As we approached our destination I picked up the next numbered bottle. It was number 13. A curious sensation passed over me and I put the bottle back, taking up number 14. "Why don't you live up to your disbelief in superstitions," I said to myself and I put bottle number 14 back. When we arrived at the place I took up number 13, got the water sample while the car was being turned and "beat it." Of course nothing happened and we finished our trip at 5 p.m. after a 60-mile tour through the area occupied by as fine a Scotch division as Scotland ever produced. There are compensations for almost everything in life if you can discover them: I never enjoyed a bath more in my life than the one I had when I reached home that night, sticky and dusty and hot, with the aid of a sponge and half a gallon of water. (Baths are rare in French houses.) _The Fire Fete._ Merville is a staunch compact little town with a big church whose lofty byzantine, rounded dome projected high into the air forms a landmark that can be seen for miles. We have been able to pick up this tower quite easily from a point in Belgium fourteen miles away--a point from which we were actually watching the bombardment of our lines at St. Eloi on the 10th of June 1916. The church is a very large one for a town of the size, but as the people are very good Catholics in that district, it was in constant use from early morning to late at night. Funerals passed to and from it daily and the chants of the resonant-voiced priests became such a frequent thing that we ceased to pay any attention to them. Funerals in France are a most terribly depressing sort of thing, anyway. One Sunday there was evidence of something unusual on hand. A stage twenty feet across had been erected against the wall of the Hotel de Ville, facing the square and approached by a flight of a dozen steps. During the course of the morning it was covered with green boughs and flowers, a cross was erected on the top while various coloured banners and the tricolors helped to make a very effective and pretty stage. Meanwhile around the church square there was great excitement. Girls of all ages in white, and boys with short white trousers, blue coats and tam-o-shanters had been going towards the church since early morning. From our laboratory window we could see these youngsters being collected into groups and being instructed by nuns. Banners of various kinds floated in the air and hung from the windows of the houses round about. We had settled into our daily work when the sound of children's voices floated through the laboratory windows, and we looked out to see a procession coming across the Grande Place, led by an old man carrying a gilded staff and wearing a cocked hat. Right behind him walked a priest between two altar boys, all three wearing elaborately worked tunics of lace; the boys carried poles with lanterns on the top.