A while ago investigated the house. Up-stairs is a little room toward the north, papered in a yellow-and-white pin-stripe design of forty or fifty years ago. In it is a yellow baroque niche with a shell design at the top, having a temple or altar-like suggestion, in spite of the too-large, ugly, marble-topped mahogany wash-stand that fills it. Above the mahogany bed is a carved wooden holy water font, a little shelf in the corner for books, and another for a lamp, and there is a window looking out on small gardens cut up into bits for flowers and vegetables. As I entered it I seemed to know that some spirit rare and strong enough to project emanations, sensible even to a stranger long after, had lived, perhaps died, in it. I settled down immediately in a really not comfortable, too-small, brown, upholstered arm-chair, sloping forward, and felt somehow as if I were in choice company, and began to turn the pages of Bordeaux’s _Dernier jour du Fort de Vaux_, which I had in my hand as I entered. But something unseen held my attention, not the book. The room was gently, softly haunted, and the world of spirits was sensibly about me.... Anyway, the plain of Châlons gives me the creeps. Joseph, reappearing this afternoon, brought the news that there had been another air raid on Bar-le-Duc at noon, and they had dropped pounds of leaflets telling of the Russian defeat, Rumanians retreating, in danger of being enveloped. The leaflets wound up by saying the Germans were sick of the war—they supposed the French were—and why not have peace? CHAPTER IV THE BURIAL OF PÈRE CAFARD CHÂLONS, _Sunday, 29th_. Telegram that M. de Sinçay may be passing through. I would like to see his _grand seigneur_ contour decorate our 1860 establishment. Go to the _Bureau de la Place_, and nothing less than a general (Abbevillers) grasps the receiver and telephones for me to Bar-le-Duc—but without result. They are all in “our” _secteur_ “of a courtesy”! Twelve-o’clock mass at Notre Dame. Again rolling music, and the green vestment of the priest especially beautiful at the end of that high gray Gothic vista. Many, many military. I thought of an English officer who said to me not long ago: “See how the soldier is exalted in the New Testament. It is certainly not the man of law, the money-changer, the man of politics, nor governors. When Christ has an especial lesson to show, how often He shows it through the soldier, even unto the servant of the centurion.”