Let us take the eats and drinks first. There is no ice-water. I admit it. I am sorry, but there it is. There never was much, but now that ammonia is mostly commandeered for munition work, there is less than ever. As a nation we do not miss it. In this country our difficulty is not to get cool, but to keep warm. Besides, it is possible that our moist climate, and the absence of steam-heat in our houses, saves us from that parched feeling which I have so often experienced in the United States. Anyway, that familiar figure of American domestic life, the iceman, is unknown to us. We drink our water at ordinary temperature—what you would call tepid—and we keep our meat in a stone cellar instead of the ice chest. As for ice-cream and soda-fountains, we have never given ourselves over to them very much. As a nation, we are hot-food eaters—that is, when we can get anything to eat! We are living on strict war rations here, just as you are beginning to do in the States. So you must forgive our apparent want of hospitality. III. THE LAND WE LIVE IN Next, our cities. After your own straight, wide, methodically-numbered streets and avenues, London, Liverpool, Glasgow, and the rest must seem like a Chinese puzzle. I can only say in excuse that they have been there a very long time, and the people who started in to build them did not foresee that they would ever extend more than a few blocks. If Julius Cæsar had known that London was ultimately going to cover an area of seven hundred square miles, and house a population of seven and a half millions, I dare say he would have made a more methodical beginning. But Julius Cæsar never visited America, and the science of town-planning was unknown to him. The narrow, winding streets of London are not suited to trolley-car lines. This fact has given us the unique London motor ’bus, driven with incredible skill, and gay with advertisements. There are not so many of these ’buses to-day as there might be, and such as there are are desperately full. But—_c’est la guerre!_ Hundreds of our motor ’buses are over in France now. You will meet them when you get there, doing their bit—hurrying reënforcements to some hard-pressed point, or running from the back areas to the railhead, conveying happy, muddy Tommies home on leave.