How one loves a thing one has fed with a teaspoon. I do not like No. 30. I am always so afraid that I shall in some way show how I dislike him. It is hateful of me, but I cannot like him. He screams at his dressings, and he is fat, and he sends out and buys cheeses and eats them. The little Zouave is better again. That is the most dreadful thing, that it is so long. He takes so long to die. The days when he is better are the most cruel days. To-day in the middle of the morning, he was beckoning to me with a feeble little thin brown hand. I went over and bent down, for he can only whisper. He said, "I said good morning to you when you first came in, and you did not know." Number 4 is not going to die. The shade of death is gone from his young face. He is going to lie for a long time on a rubber cushion that has a tube hanging down, quite long, like a tail. Every day, for a long time, at the dressings I shall have to pull back the sheets and blankets and take away the hoop, and see that thing that used to be a big fine man lying quite helpless and of so strange a shape upon the rubber cushion with the tail. The Omelet The vine was red on the white old soft wall. It was very beautiful. There were masses of purple asters under the red vine, against the wall. There was a bowl of purple asters on the table between the carafes of red and white vine. We had an omelet and bread and butter and raspberries, and water, very beautiful in the thick greenish glasses. Under the yellow boughs of the lime tree we could see the misty valley and the mountains. The table had a red-and-white cloth. The little old thin brown woman who served us wanted to talk all the time with us. She wanted to talk about the omelet; she had made it and was very proud of it. She wanted to talk about the war and to talk about her son. She said that there had been some horrible, strange mistake and that people thought that he was dead. She had had a paper from the Ministry of War telling her he was dead. It was very strange. She had had a letter also from the Aumonier, telling her he was dead. But, of course, she knew. She said he would come home, and be so sorry she had had such dreadful news, and so glad that she had not believed it. They would laugh together. He had beautiful white teeth, she said, and his eyes screwed tight up when he laughed. She told us how she and he would laugh together. Gentilhommière The road, up through the vineyards and pastures and fields of maize and of buckwheat, was like the bed of a mountain torrent, all tossed down, and grey and stony, between the poplars. In other years it had been a well enough kept little road, but in this year there was no one to care for it. And surely it had been a mountain torrent, in the spring's last melting of snows and in the heavy rains of the summer. Who was there left to mend it? Or who, indeed, to travel it? We climbed it slowly in the golden autumn afternoon.