I have this class of parishioners very much on my conscience. I can’t get the other chaplains to help except on the few occasions when regiments, or parts of them occupy the same place. Every chaplain has five times what he can do to supply Sunday services for his own scattered command. At any rate, I can assure you that the different elements in the old regiment have fused properly. By the way, I cannot remember anything that delighted me more than when I heard Sergeant Abe Blaustein was to get the Croix de Guerre—he was recommended for it by Major Donovan and Major Stacom (the pride of our parish) and Lieutenant Cavanaugh. He is a good man, Abe, and the 69th appreciates a good man when it sees him. John O’Keefe’s poem made a hit with all of us. That reminds me of something at my expense. Captain John Prout approached me with a genial grin to tell me that at our Christmas Mass he had seen a Jew boy present, and later on he asked him “What were you doing at Mass?” “Oh, Captain,” he said, “you know I’d go to Hell with you.” Prout said to me, “The compliment to myself is very obvious, Father,—I hope that you will be able to find in it one for yourself too.” But I started to tell you about my work. I have a congregation of the old faith, approximately three thousand souls. They are generally scattered through five or six French villages, when _en repos_, and more scattered still through trenches and abandoned towns when in line. To begin with the form of pastoral activity you are no doubt most interested in, for you will be getting a parish one of these days—I take up no collections. ’Tis a sad confession to make, and I expect to be put out of the Pastor’s Union when I get back for breach of rules. But the lads are not left entirely without proper training. The old French curés (God bless them, they are a fine lot of old gentlemen) take up the collection. A tremendously important-looking old beadle in a Napoleonic cocked hat and with a long staff goes before, with a money-or-your-life air about him, and in the rear comes the apologetic mannered curé, or perhaps a little girl, carrying a little dish that is a stimulus to stinginess, which is timidly pushed forward a few inches in the direction of the man on the outside seat. If the man is an American he grabs the dish and sticks it under the nose of his neighbor, with a gruff whisper, “Cough up.” They cough up all right—if it isn’t too far from payday. Even at that they are good for more of the Cigar Store coupons and the copper washers that pass for money here than are the local worshippers. The curés proclaim us the most generous people in the world—and so we are—which makes it unanimous. They listen with open mouths to my tales of financial returns in city parishes at home and wish secretly that they had started life where things are run like that—until I tell them of the debts we have to carry, and they are content once more that their lot has been cast in the quiet, old-time