In a short time a small bit of steak and a potato cut in quarters and fried were placed before me, and simultaneously a large black dog with wistful eyes but determined manner stationed himself at my side. The steak was followed by a chilly little salad, bread and cheese, and more butter than I had seen for many a month in Paris--and a cup of tea which, for its grateful warmth, I drank without challenge. Snatches of honest English, mingled with French, filtered in from the café, where the fire was not quite extinct and where beer was served until 9 o'clock. Before that hour I was fumbling upstairs guided by the patronne, who carried a two-inch stub of candle between her fingers. "This is the way to the cave," she explained, pointing to a doorway under the stairs. "In case of an alarm you have only to rush down there. There will be a light burning at the entrance." Passing through the hallway she indicated the spot where a man had recently been killed. "If he had stayed where he was, at the table where you have just eaten, Madame, he would have been all right, but as he ran to the refuge a bomb exploded outside in the square, burst open the front door, traversed the length of the corridor, passed through the kitchen wall and into the garden beyond. But you can rest assured that nothing will happen tonight, Madame," continued the patronne, who seemed as familiar with the habits of Gothas as a farmer's wife is with those of fowls--"Not in this wind, oh, no!" After that first night I groped my way alone to bed, the candle stub having come to an end, feeling my way along the pitch dark passageways to the room with the linoleum mat, the room which had not known fire for three years and a half, whose paneless windows were boarded up, the one room in the house which had not lost a ceiling or floor or whose walls were not clipped through with shells. The regular inmates of the hotel slept nightly in the cellar. It saved time and was warmer. Notwithstanding the reassurances of the patronne I confess to going to bed with half my clothes on. But under the wing of the storm Dunkirk slept tranquilly for three successive nights. Of course, there was always the soft bum-bum of the cannon on the northern horizon, strange tremors shook the bed, and the night was full of weird sounds, the rattling skeletons of dead houses. BRAVE LITTLE DUNKIRK