Every house is full of boarders. Every village family has given, joyfully, one, two, three of its best rooms for the cot beds of the Americans! Barns and wagon-houses are transformed to dormitories. They are learning French. They are adopted by the family. Sammy’s in the kitchen with the mother and the daughter. Bugle! They are piling down the main street to their own American breakfast—cooked in the open, eaten in the open, this fine weather. In front of houses are canvas reservoirs of filtered drinking-water. The duck pond in Main street is being lined with cement. The streets are swept every morning. There are flowers. The village was always picturesque. Now it is beautiful. Chaplains’ clubs are set up in empty houses. The only large tent is that of the Y. M. C. A.; and it is _camouflaged_ against enemy observers by being painted in streaked gray-green-brown, to melt into the colors of the hill against which it is backed up, practically invisible. Its “canteen on wheels” is loaded with towels, soap, razors, chocolate, crackers, games, newspapers, novels, and tobacco. At cross-roads, little flat Y. M. C. A. tents (painted grass and earth color) serve as stations for swift autos carrying packages and comforts. In them are found coffee, tea, and chocolate, ink, pens, letter-paper, and envelopes; and a big sign reminds Sammy that “You Promised Your Mother a Letter, Write It Today!” All decent and in order. Otherwise the men could never have gone through the strenuous coaching for the front so quickly and well. In “Our Village,” not a duck or goose or chicken has failed to respond to the roll call in the past forty days—which is more than can be said of a French company billet, or many a British. Fruit hung red and yellow in the orchards till the gathering. I don’t say the families had as many bushels as a “good year”; but there is no criticism. In a word, Sammy has good manners. He looks on these French people with a sort of awed compassion. “They had a lot to stand!” he whispers. And the villagers, who are no fools (“as wily as a villager,” runs the French proverb), quite appreciate these fine shades. And the house dog wags his tail at the sight of khaki, as the boys come loafing in the cool of the back yard after midday dinner. In the evening the family play cards in the kitchen, and here no effort is necessary to induce the girls to learn English, for, though they pretend that they are teaching French, they are really—very slyly—“picking up” English while they are being introduced to the mysteries of draw-poker. Says the writer in _The Times:_ So, it goes like this when they play poker in the kitchen—the old French father, the pretty daughter, the flapper girl cousin, and three roughnecks. (One boy has the sheets of “Conversational French in Twenty Days,” and really thinks that he is conversing—“_Madame_, _mademoiselle_, _maman_, _monsieur_, _papa_, or _mon oncle_, pass the buck and get busy!”)