It was raining and hailing and blowing as we made blind dashes from one to the other with the French directors. A consolation to find oneself in the dormitories where many blessed tiny babies lay asleep (or howling!) in little cots or perambulators, out of the horrid cold. They are not always orphans, but their mothers work in the fields of Lorraine or in the munitions-factories. Doctor Peel, second in charge, came at last from a distant building, and met us in the school-room, out of which a hundred noisy, warm, well-fed children were scuffling. Tea was offered us, but we came away; time was short and I was a-hungered, after the cold, windy, wet desolation of the Luxembourg barracks, for a sight of the beautiful cathedral. Some one said, “Why ‘sight-seeing’?” but I said, “It’s soul-seeing.” And there was some lifting of the being as we stepped into the loveliness of the pale-gray vaulting of the church of St.-Étienne. At the end of the apse was an immense, high, narrow, blue window, and it reminded me of Huysmans’s phrase about the cathedral of Chartres, “_Une blonde aux yeux bleus._” We stepped over worn _pierres tombales_, and as I stood on one of them, whose date, scarcely decipherable, was fifteen hundred and something, I looked up and saw in the wall a new marble plaque, and it was to the memory of “_Jean Bourhis, aviateur-pilote, chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur, Croix de Guerre, né 1888.... Mort glorieusement pour la Patrie, le 22 mars, 1916._” And so one’s thoughts are jerked from the past into the dreadful, sacramental present. Close by the cathedral is the Hôtel de Ville, once the Episcopal Palace, a gem of the eighteenth century. We stepped from the little square in front of the church into the wet, wind-swept garden. At one end is a flat, round fountain, and behind it is a moss-grown statue of a woman in contemplation, and one side of the garden is hedged in by the flying buttresses and gargoyles of the cathedral. Broad, low steps lead down to its gravel walks from the terrace of the Palace, onto which open long windows, forming a great hemicycle. I did not need to see it under warm, sunset skies, with the linden-trees of the garden in full blossom, to be possessed of its charm. An American soldier was coming out of the cathedral as we issued from the garden in a gust of wind which blew my umbrella wrong side out, and when I and it were righted he was gone. But it’s all a part of history. We went for a moment to St.-Gengoult, the old Gothic church in the rue Carnot. (Like every town in Lorraine and in the whole of France there is a rue Carnot, and it’s horribly monotonous when your soul is aflame.) As we entered, a thick rich light came through the ancient windows.