The snow danced in a fine white mist over the ploughed fields, and drove perpetually against the northerly sides of the tall bare tree-trunks that lined the way for miles, hardly finding a hold upon the smooth flanks of the planes, but sinking into the rough-barked limes till they looked dappled with their brown ridges and the white veining, and oddly as though covered with the pelt of some strange animal. High in the web of bare branches, the clumps of mistletoe showed as filigree nests for some race of fairy birds. Gracious country this, for all the desolate whiteness; it lay in great rolling slopes with drifts of purplish elms in the folds, and on the levels winding steel-dark streams along whose banks the upward-springing willows burned an ardent rust colour. And as the car rocked and bounded along and the wind screen first starred in one place, then in another, then fell out altogether, one got a better and better view of it all. What a wonderful people the French are for agriculture.... Hardly a man did I see all the days I motored about and about, but I saw mile after mile of cultivated land, the sombrely-clad women or boys guiding the slow ploughs, the rough-coated horses pulling patiently--white horses that looked pale against the bare earth, but a dark yellow when the snow came to show up the tarnishing that the service of man brings upon beasts. Several times I saw English soldiers ploughing, and rejoiced. We came into the town that was our bourn in the grey of the evening, passed the grey glimmer of the river between its grey stone quays, passed the grey miracle of the cathedral, and then, in the rapidly deepening dusk, turned in through great wrought iron gates into a grey courtyard. It may have been gathered that, much as I admire both their practical perfection and their spiritual significance, I am no lover of camps, which seem to me among all things man-created upon God's earth about the most depressing. I had lived and moved and had my being in camps it seemed to me for countless ages, the edges of my soul were frayed with camps. From the moment of walking into the old house at R---- a wonderful sense of rest that brooded over the place enveloped me. The thing had an atmosphere, impossible to exaggerate, though very difficult to convey, but I shall never forget the miracle that house was to me. It was a Hostel for the Relations of Wounded, and there are in France at present some half-dozen of these houses, supported by the Joint War Committee of the Red Cross and the Order of St. John, and staffed by V.A.D.'s. At all of them the relations of badly wounded are lodged and fed free of charge, while cars meet them and also convey them to and from the hospital. This much I knew as plain facts, what I had not been prepared for was the breath of exquisite pleasure that emanated from this house.