“I’m mighty glad,” he told me, “I was just about to go out and pick up a chicken on the street, when you came in.” The opera was a dream of loveliness. I felt as if I must have done something very good indeed in some previous existence to be thus rewarded. Today I encountered two boys who told me how they had “done” Paris. “We stopped at a store and bought a bunch of post cards, all the famous buildings and everything. Then we got a taxi. After that all we’d do was to show the chauffeur a post card and he’d drive us to it,—then we’d show him another one, and so we kept a-goin’ until we’d seen most all of Paris. But gee! That taxi bill was a fright!” This afternoon, coming down the “Boulevard de Wop,” as the boys call the Boulevard des Italiens, I paused beside a fiacre, attached to a particularly wretched looking old nag, which was drawn up by the sidewalk. Into it were piling merrily some eight or nine doughboys, the cabman fairly dancing on his seat as he uttered frantic but perfectly unheeded expostulations. Finally as the cabby appeared to be developing apoplexy, I spoke up. “Boys, you know that _really_ that broken-down old beast never _could_ pull all of you!” Whereupon half of them immediately piled out again. One of the remaining ones leaned out of the fiacre. “Say Lady, can you talk French?” he demanded earnestly. “Why a little.” “Well tell that old guy for me, will you,” he indicated the still disgruntled _cocher_ who, like the rest of his tribe, was crowned with an ornamental “stove-pipe,” “that I want him to lend me his hat.” Tonight I met a girl I know who is in the Hut Equipment Department. She has just returned from an extended tour of inspection. I told her I didn’t know where my next assignment was to be. “Why don’t you go to Verdun?” she asked. “The conditions about there are worse than any other place in France. Men are commiting suicide there every day.” So I wrote a note to the Office asking that I be sent to Verdun. Bar-le-Duc, February 16. Somewhere here in Bar-le-Duc there is an extraordinary thing. It is the Mausoleum of René of Chalons, prince of Orange, and designed in accordance with his wishes. Against an ermine mantle, under a rich armorial crest, stands a skeleton or rather the rotting carcass of a man, half bone and half disintegrating tissue, holding aloft in one ghastly hand, his heart, an offering, so the story goes, to his lady wife. Every time I am in Bar-le-Duc, even if it is only an hour between trains, I go hunting for that skeleton; but the nearest I have come so far, is to find it on a picture post card. Once I thought I had surely run it to earth when I came upon a strange old church built so as to bridge a narrow moat-like canal, and so low that it seemed as if the water must ooze up through the stone slabs of the floor, but no.