These small French villages in the north of France resemble nothing that we have in our country. They are charming and picturesque, but various features are lacking which to the well-ordered American mind causes pain. To begin with, there is no system of plumbing. The village gets all its water supply from the public fountains. This naturally makes a bath an almost unknown luxury. Many times I have been asked by the French peasants why I wanted a bath, and should it be winter, was I not afraid I would be taken sick if I took one. Around these public fountains the village life centers. There the chattering groups of women and girls are always congregating. There the gossip of the countryside originates and runs its course. There is rarely electric light in the small towns, and enormous manure piles are in front of each house and in the street. The houses themselves are a combination affair, barn and house under the same roof. The other features that are always present are the church and café. Even in the smallest town there are generally charming chapels. The cafés are where the opinions of the French nation are formed. The peasants who live in these villages have an immemorial custom behind them in most of their actions. They have the careful attitude of an old people, very difficult for our young and wasteful nation to understand. Each stray bit of wood, each old piece of iron, is saved and laid aside for future use. No great wasteful fires roar on the hearth, but rather a few fagots, carefully measured to do just what is intended for them. The families have lived in the same spot for generations. Their roots are very firmly in the ground. Individually they are a curious combination of simplicity and shrewdness. One old woman with whom my brother Archie was billeted in the town of Boviolles became quite a friend of ours. We talked together in the evening, sitting by the great fireplace, in which a little bit of a fire would be burning. She had never in her life been farther than six or eight miles from the village of Boviolles. To her Paris was as unreal as Colchis or Babylon to us. She, in common with her country folk, looked forward to the arrival of the American army, much in the way we would look forward to the arrival of the Hottentots. In fact, when she heard we were coming to the village, she at first decided to run away. To her the United States was a wilderness inhabited by Indians and cowboys. We told her about New York City and Chicago. We told her that New York was larger than Paris and that neither of us had ever shot a bear there and no Indians tomahawked people on the street. We explained to her that if you took all the houses in the village and placed them one on top of another they would not stand as high as some of our buildings. As a result, she felt toward us much as the contemporaries of Marco Polo felt toward him--we were amiable story-tellers and that was all.