Once too we had a party, an athletic stunt party. There were potato-races and sack-races, string-eating contests, three-legged and obstacle-races; but the sensational, the crowning event was, of course, the pie-race. The pies which were of French manufacture had only been arranged after difficulties: consulting the _boulangère_ at Bourmont I had discovered that the calendar now only allows two pie-days per week, Sunday and Wednesday; since the party was to be Friday, pie was unlawful, unless—and here the law, like all good laws allowed a loop-hole—unless the pie be made with commissary flour! The pie-race was the “dark horse” on the programme. Fearing that if the boys learned beforehand of the prospective pie not only would we be mobbed by would-be contestants but also that their interest in the rest of the programme would suffer, we had kept the pie-race a profound secret. Smuggled in when the hut was empty those pies had reposed serenely under the counter all afternoon and contrary to my fears not a boy had sniffed them! When the proper moment came the pies were placed on a board in the middle of the floor, the contestants, of whom Pat was one, knelt with their hands tied behind them. At the word _go!_ they fell to. The hut howled. Then it was discovered that Corporal G. laboured under a cruel handicap; _his_ pie was a cherry pie and every cherry had a stone in it. Half-way through his pie, Pat, jerking one hand loose, seized a large piece, plastered it on the head of his opponent opposite; the race ended in a riot. Strangely enough, when peace was restored not a trace of pie could be found anywhere,—nowhere, that is, except in the back hair of the contestants. Bourmont, January 6. Now I know how the prince in the fairy tale felt when he was bidden to climb the mountain of glass. For Bourmont Hill is sheeted with ice, and it is fairly as much as one’s life is worth to attempt to go up or down. Every morning I stand and look at that dizzying slide aghast, and wonder if I may possibly reach the foot alive; then assistance comes, sometimes in the shape of a French lad in _sabots_, sometimes as a stalwart doughboy with a sharp-pointed staff, and together the two of us go slipping, slithering down the hill-side. In the middle of the road yelling doughboys, seated on cakes of ice, whiz by at a mad rate of speed; long before they reach the bottom of the slope, the ice-cake splinters into bits, but the doughboy shoots on downward, sprawling, spinning like a top, while you hold your breath and gape to see that his neck isn’t broken. For the French people all this supplies the sensation of a life-time; they crowd their front doors and their front yards laughing, shrieking warning or encouragement, as they watch the progress of the mad Americans up and down the hill. “If one could only have a movie of Bourmont Hill on a day like this!” sighs the Gendarme. The other day I encountered a sergeant of engineers on the hill-side.