Dr. Blake has been magnificent. His operations are something beyond words. Men came in to me for treatment and told me that he worked actual miracles with faces that were blown off, building new jaws, and oh, Heavens! I don't know what not. VIII--STORY OF A FRENCH MOTHER AT MASS Paris, July 20th, 1915. DEAREST VIOLET, I saw a very touching thing the other day in the Madeleine, where I went to Mass. A woman no longer young, in the heaviest of crape, came in and sat down and buried her face in her hands. She shook with suppressed sobs and terrible weeping. Presently there came in another worshipper, a stranger to her, and sat down by her side. He was a splendid-looking officer in full-dress uniform--a young man, with a wedding-ring upon his hand--one of those permissionnaires home, evidently, for the short eight days that all the officers are given now--a hiatus between the old war and the new. He bent too, praying; but the weeping of the woman at his side evidently tore his heart. Presently she lifted her face and wiped her eyes, and the officer put his hand on hers. And as I was sitting near, I heard what he said: "_Pauvre madame, pauvre madame!... Ma mère pleure comme vous._" She glanced at him, then bent again in prayer. But when she had finished, before she left her seat, I heard her say to him: "_Monsieur, j'ai beaucoup prié pour vous. Sachez que vous aves les prières d'une vieille mère a laquelle ne reste rien au monde._" He touched her hand again and said: "Merci, madame. Adieu!" * * * * * It was just one of those intensely touching pictures in that dimly lighted church, full of worshippers, that one can never forget.... IX--STORY OF A LITTLE SOLDIER FROM AFRICA _To Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt, Newport._ 4, Place du Palais Bourbon, Paris, Aug., 1915. DEAREST ANNE, Wandering about alone, as I have been doing a great deal lately, I have gone into many of the churches and prayed at the different shrines, and it is impressive to see the character of those who come in to pray. Men who can never kneel again; men who sit with bandaged eyes before the lighted altars, for whom all the visions of the world have been blotted out for ever; the poor women in their little shawls; women in their crape veils; the man going to the Front; the man who has come back from it, never to take an active part in life again; and the women who ask the Mother of Sorrows to remember theirs.... A very agreeable Abbé dined with me last night. He told me that he was giving absolution to one dying German boy--only sixteen--on the field, and he put his hand under the boy's head and lifted it, and the boy, who was delirious, simply said: "Mama, mama, mama!" And the Abbé said to me: "It is a very curious thing, but in all the dying appeals I have ever heard, it is always for the _mother_." That return, perhaps, to the lost childhood--the call just before going to sleep....