"But if they are country-people who live in these dry-looking villages," asked our American Ambulance boys, "what makes them huddle up so close together and run the houses into one long wall of buildings that look like tenement-houses? Why don't they have nice front yards like ours, with grass and flowers, and people sitting on the front porch, enjoying life? You can go through village after village here and never see a thing but those ugly, stony streets and long, high, stone walls, and bare, stony houses, and never a soul but maybe an old woman with a gunny sack on her back, or a couple of kids lugging water in a pail." The best answer to that was to open the door into our own bare, stone house, which, like all the others on the street, presented to the public eye an unalluring, long, gray-white, none-too-clean plastered wall, broken by square windows designed for utility only. The big door opening showed a stone-paved corridor leading straight to what seemed at first glance an earthly Paradise of green; an old, old garden with superb nut-trees, great flowering bushes, a bit of grass, golden graveled paths, and high old gray walls with grapevines and fruit-trees carefully trained against them. Our American visitor stared about him with dazzled eyes. "What a heavenly place! But who ever would have guessed such a garden was in Crouy!" "Oh, but this is not one of the really good gardens of the town," we assured him. "This is a poor old neglected one compared with those all around us." "But where _are_ they?" asked our American incredulously, his vision cut off by the ten-foot wall. At this we invited him upstairs to a lofty window at the back of the house, leaning from which he had a totally new view of the town whose arid gray streets he had traversed so many times. Back of every one of these gray-white, monotonously aligned plastered houses stretched a garden, often a very large one, always a jewel, gleaming, burnished, and ordered, with high old trees near the house, and flowers and vines; and, back of this pleasure spot, a great fertile stretch of well-kept vegetables and fruit. He stared long, our American, reconstructing his ideas with racial rapidity. On withdrawing his head his first comment was, usually: "But for the Lord's sake, how ever do they get the money to pay for building all those miles of huge stone walls? It must cost every family a fortune." Upon learning that those walls had stood exactly there in those very lines for hundreds of years, requiring only to be periodically kept in repair, he sank into another momentary reconstructive meditation. Then came the inevitable American challenge, the brave new note from the New World which I always rejoiced to hear: