That random shot opened wide to me the gates of Romance and High Adventure. It broke the long silence of the girl just ahead. "It's comforting just to hear the name of one's own home state," she said. "I lived in a little village in the western part of Pennsylvania," and, incidentally, she named the village where my father had once been minister of the church. I explained as much to her and marveled at the coincidence. "More marvel still," she said, "for we come not only from the same state and the same village, but from the same house. My father was minister in that same church." Nickleville is the prosaic name of that little hamlet in western Pennsylvania. Any gentle reader with a cynic strain there may verify this chronicle and find fresh confirmation for the ancient adage that "Fact is stranger far than Fiction." That selfsame evening we held reunion in a cafe off the Boulevard Clichy. There I first discerned the slightness of her frame and marveled at the spirit that filled it. She was exuberant in the joy of meeting a countryman and, with the device of laughter, she kept in check the sadness which never quite came welling up in tears. She was typical American but let her bear here the name by which her new friends in France called her--Marie. One might linger upon her large eyes and golden hair, but this is not the epic of a fair face but of a fair soul--vigorous and determined, too. To the power therein even the stolid waiter paid his homage. "Pardon," he interjected once, "we must close now. The orders are for all lights out by nine. It is the government. They fear the Zeppelins." "But that's just what I'm afraid of, too," Marie answered. "How can you turn us out into that darkness filled with Zeppelins?" He succumbed to this radiant banter and, covering every crevice that might emit a ray of light, he let us linger on long after closing time. Marie's was one of those classic souls which by some anomaly, passing by the older lineages and cultures of the East, find birthplace in a bleak untutored village of the West. To this bareness some succumb, and the divine afflatus dies. Still others roam restlessly up and down, searching until they find their milieu and then for the first time their spirit glows. Music had breathed upon this girl's spirit, touched with a vagabond desire. To satisfy it she must have money. So she gave lessons to children. Then a publisher bought some little melodies that she had set to words. And lastly, grave and reverend committeemen, after hesitating over her youth, made her head of music in a university of western Montana.