It lasted two hours, and we stood there in our catch-as-catch-can costumes, trying not to feel the cold stone of the balcony through our kid night slippers. We were sure we smelled gunpowder, and some one suggested gas bombs--not exactly pleasant. The hum of aeroplanes was continual and the explosion of guns frequent. When one would be especially loud, some one would call out, "Attitudes of defense, girls--turn up your coat collars--here comes the Crown Prince!" "Have you on your Boston grips, Marje?--if so, no metal can touch you!" "Here, here, you great bonehead Boche, you came to get Lloyd George and Pershing and General Foch and that crowd--don't break up our happy little home life!" I got too tired and cold to stand out there any longer, so I took a nap on Hannah's bed until the bugle of "All danger's past" blew. You can't imagine how that sounds until once you've seen the Germans come toward you and have felt yourself an insignificant, but a very much concerned, target. You never heard anything so full of joy! We adjourned to Hilda's room and the practical spirits of the crowd soon had some solid alcohol burning and some Whitman's instantaneous chocolate in the saucepan. It certainly went to the spot with toasterettes as an accompaniment--and still another accompaniment of the bugle call growing fainter in the distance. We went to bed, and oh, how we slept! We have wanted to experience a real raid and now we have, and we've had one and that's enough. This morning the maids brought in wild tales with our breakfast. The École des Mines had been hit, on the Boulevard Saint-Michel. The morning papers said nothing. As the workers came strolling in to the Vestiaire, heavy-eyed from lack of sleep, but bursting with questions, we could get little definite news. Mlle. Herzog and I started out hot-foot for the École des Mines, hoping that the work would not grudge us half an hour for satisfying our curiosity. We found a big crowd, managed by a policeman standing in front of the École, in which every window was broken. So was every window on both sides of the Boulevard for several hundred feet, and a big ragged hole beside the asphalt showed where the bomb had fallen. Things seem so different in the daytime--there were all the commonplace buildings, the tram, the policeman, the landmarks that we know so well, and yet the sidewalks were covered with broken glass and limbs of trees, and that big hole had been made by a real live Boche! It seemed fairly near home too--the spot is about as far from us as three New York short blocks, perhaps a little farther; but it doesn't seem so far away to drop a bomb when some one has come all the way from Germany.