DEAR JACK,--_Bon joor!_ That's French for how are you. It's wonderful how quick you get the hang of a language. We haven't been here more than a week, and I find myself thinking in French. When I waked up this morning the first thing I said was _voilà_, and when I got down to breakfast and the waiter brought me a chop with mushrooms on it, without having to think at all I said _kerskersay_, which is French for what on earth's that. What's more, I dream in French. I drempt the other night that Napoleon came back to life again and asked me to take dinner with him, and I went and kept up a conversation all through the evening with him in his own language. He kept calling me Mussoo Bobbee and I'd call him M. le General. He told me all about his battles, how he ran across the bridge of Lody with bullets just raining all about him, and lots of awful funny things about himself that made me roar with laughter. But the queer part of it all is that while I understood him perfectly well while I was asleep, the minute I waked up I couldn't translate a thing he'd said to me. That's the worst of dreams, but I'm glad I had that one, because I really feel now as if I'd met Napoleon. [Illustration] I tell you, Jack, he was a great man that Napoleon. He wasn't big, but he covered the ground. Pop says he was the greatest man that ever lived except me and George Washington. He wasn't a Frenchman at all, only a Corsican. And he was a fighter right from the start. He used to make snow forts at school, and when it came to a snowball fight, Pop says he wasn't out of it a minute. He was fearfully brave, and if it hadn't been for the weather he'd never have been beaten at Waterloo. Somehow or other he couldn't fight in the wet, and every time he had the elements against him he got beaten. When he got to Moscow the Russians set fire to the town, and that beat him, and on the way back the snow just regularly froze him out, and then it rained at Waterloo, and that finished him. [Illustration] They keep his memory very green here though, which I am glad of because he deserved it. He's got a tomb that's worth dying for to get. It's out back of the Hotel des Invalides under a great big dome, and it's so arranged that when the sun shines through two big stained yellow glass windows at the back it looks as if great rivers of glory were being poured on it; and all around it are the battle flags with cannon-ball holes in them, and altogether it makes you feel as if little chills were playing tag up and down your back.