A few days later came another episode to disprove any rumors that the American heel was being applied with undue harshness. The village undertaker came in to state that a man living on the edge of town was expected to die, and that he had no lumber with which to make him a coffin. The tender-hearted lieutenant, who had seen many comrades done to death in tricky ambuscades on the western front, issued orders that the undertaker be permitted to purchase materials for a half-dozen caskets, and as the petitioner bowed his guttural thanks he assured him: “You are entirely welcome. Whenever you need any more lumber for a similar purpose do not hesitate to call on me. I hope you will come early and often.” The Boche gazed at the speaker with the glass-eyed expressionlessness peculiar to his race, bowed his thanks again, and departed. Whether or not he “got the idea” is not certain. My latest letter from the lieutenant contains the postscript, “I also had the satisfaction of granting another request for lumber for six coffins.” They were singing a familiar old song with new words during my last weeks in Coblenz, the chorus beginning “The Rhine, the Rhine, the Yankee Rhine.” For many miles up and down the historic stream it seemed so indeed. I have been in many foreign ports in my day, and in none of them have I seen the American flag so much in evidence as at the junction of the Moselle and “Father Rhine.” The excursion steamers—those same side-wheelers on which you rode that summer you turned tourist, on which you ate red cabbage at a table hemmed in by paunchy, gross Germans who rolled their sentimental eyes as the famous cliff roused in them a lusty attempt to sing of the Lorelei with her golden hair—carried the Stars and Stripes at their stern now. They were still manned by their German crews; a resplendent “square-head” officer still majestically paced the bridge. But they were in command of American Marines, “snappy,” keen-eyed young fellows who had fought their way overland—how fiercely the Boche himself knows only too well—till they came to water again, like the amphibians that they are. A “leatherneck” at the wheel, a khaki-clad band playing airs the Rhine cliffs never echoed back in former years, a compact mass of happy Yanks packing every corner, they plow placidly up and down the stream which so many of their passengers never dreamed of seeing outside their school-books, dipping their flags to one another as they pass, a rubber-lunged “Y” man pouring out megaphoned tales and legends as each “castled crag,” flying the Stars and Stripes or the Tricolor now, loomed into view, rarely if ever forgetting to add that unsuspected little touch of “propaganda,” “Burned by the French in 1689.” Baedeker himself never aspired to see his land so crowded with tourists and sightseers as it was in the spring of 1919. Now and then a shipload of those _poilus_ who waved to us from the shore