I breakfasted to-day at the restaurant Champeaux, Place de la Bourse. Two agents-de-change (official members of the Paris Stock Exchange) took very gloomy views of the situation. It seems, however, that the French rentes maintain their quotation of seventy-five francs. Mr. Elmer Roberts of the Associated Press and Mr. Hart O. Berg sat at our table. Both thought that the war would be much longer than at first expected and would depend upon how long Germany could exist, owing to the impossibility of obtaining food from abroad. "Eight months," said Mr. Berg. After lunch I went with Roberts to see the departure of the first contingent of American volunteers from the Gare Saint-Lazare. These youths are a tall, stalwart lot, marching with a sort of cowboy swing. They were not in uniform, but wore flannel shirts, broad-brimmed felt hats, and khaki trousers. They carried a big American flag surmounted with a huge bouquet of roses, and alongside this a large French flag. They were loudly cheered as they were entrained for Rouen, where they will be drilled into effective shape. I met Mrs. Edith Wharton, who remains in Paris, and is doing good work with her _ouvroir_, or sewing-circle, which, with Mrs. Thorne, she has organized in the Rue Vaneau. This _ouvroir_ is to supply work to unmarried French women and widows. Among those who have liberally subscribed to this are Mrs. William Jay, Mrs. Elbert H. Gary, Mrs. Beach Grant, and Mrs. Griswold Gray. I went in the afternoon to see Madame Waddington at her _ouvroir_, 156 Boulevard Haussmann. Madame Waddington makes an appeal by cable to the _New York Tribune_, calling upon all American women and men to aid her indigent French sewing-women, who are employed in making garments for the sick and wounded, for which they receive one and a half francs (thirty cents) and one meal, for a day's work. Madame Waddington wore a gray linen gown, with a red cross, and was working away very merrily, distributing materials to the women. She told me that her son had joined the colors as a sergeant in an infantry reservist regiment and was at the front. M. Maurice Maeterlinck, the Belgian writer and philosopher, is living at his quaint Abbaye de Sainte-Wandrille, on the Seine near Caudebec. The author of _La Vie des Abeilles_ has been helping the peasants gather the wheat harvest. [Photograph: Photo by Paul Thompson. A party of American volunteers crossing the Place de l'Opera in Paris on their way to enlist.] After three weeks, during which relief funds have been advanced to Americans at the Embassy, the demands for money continue to be as heavy as ever. Paris is a human clearing-house, into which new arrivals are now coming every day from Switzerland and elsewhere. Although many tourists have been helped and started on their way for the United States, new ones take their places before they are fairly out of the way.