A long day. Many pages of the book of life and death turned. Just before leaving Nancy, made a little tour of the battered station. Scarcely a pane of glass left anywhere, but in and out of it is the ceaseless movement of blue-clad men. A few flecks of a strange, dull amber in a pale-pink sky, the true sunset sky of Nancy. A bishop with a military cap and a chaplain in khaki pass, lines of _camions_ and Red Cross ambulances. Suddenly, beyond the station, a dark-winged thing against the sky is seen to drop, right itself for a moment, then a column of smoke goes up from it, then a flame, then there is a falling of something black just behind the twin Gothic towers of St.-Léon. The streets filled instantly, “_C’est un des nôtres_,” said a man with field-glasses, and then, death in the sky not being unusual here, they went about their business, and the long, delicate towers of St.-Léon got black as ink against the flaming sky. But a man’s soul was being breathed out in some distant beet-root field or in the forest of Haye. Peace to him! The next thing I saw, that has become a familiar sight in the last months, was an American soldier on some sort of permission, and hanging from his arm, neatly bound, was a pretty little “dictionary”—from whom, however, came sounds of broken English. The British Expeditionary Force saved the classics from destruction at one time; now “salvage” seems to be rather the turn of the American forces. One can only philosophize on the indestructibility of matter. The Place Stanislas was a bit out of our way, but when I saw the lovely Louis XV knots of pink that the orb of day was tying in the sky before he quite departed I begged for three minutes in its pale loveliness. Against the delicate ribbons of the sky were urns and figures, urns with stone flames arising from them, softly glowing, or stone flower-twisted torches held by winged beings, children and youths or angels I knew not—but I did know in a flash just how and why the Place Stanislas came into being. In the gray streets were blue-clad, heavily laden men, and the chill autumn twilight was falling about them. Oh, Nancy! dream of the past and yet with so much of the hope of the present within your gates! As we sped out of town, through the vast manufacturing suburbs, I turned and saw a bank of orange glory in the west, cut into browns and reds, with little threadings of gray and green and blue, for all the world like an ancient Cashmere shawl with light thrown on it. Night was falling as we passed through St.-Nicolas du Port. The two immense towers of the church, which dominate the landscape, were cutting black and cypress-like into the sky. The streets were full of dim figures—soldiers, overalled men, and many trousered women coming from munition-factories, with baskets and clinging children, hurrying home to get the evening meal.