What impresses one above all is their modesty, patience and patriotism. Whether they are doctors or lawyers, peasants or little artisans, they all show the same soul-stirring love for France, they count their sufferings as nothing compared to the welfare of the nation. The life of the last ten years which we knew and loved so well, has vanished like the snows of yester-year. Where the tango was danced are now long rows of hospital cots. The music of the Hungarian band has given place to the silence of the ambulance corridors. Crippled men are sitting on the casino verandas where fashionable women in former years strolled in idleness and elegance. Horrid odors of iodoform and chloroform assail one, instead of the perfume of the flowers. The gay young girls of other days, who laughed and flirted and danced in these airy halls, are now demure Red Cross nurses, in severe white linen gowns, the Red Cross embroidered on their white veils; a vivid testimony to their real nature and pitying compassion for the helpless. What a few awful months of this World's War seems to us over here. You in America, who continue to live as much as usual, can really have but little conception. To you that pageant and tragedy of war is as "A Tale that is Told"—very horrible, perhaps, but of necessity it cannot affect you intimately. You can know little of the heartrending day-by-day experience and hourly ordeals demanded of those men and women of France. Some few weeks ago I attended a class for "first aid" to the injured, whose matron was rather a formidable Frenchwoman, laden with years and honors. As I went in, a friendly Red Cross nurse murmured: "The poor Marquise had just received a telegram two hours ago announcing the death of both her sons; but, you know, her husband was killed in September, and she has given her boys to France. She does not wish it mentioned—do not refer to it." As I looked at that wrinkled but composed countenance, so stern and so calm, as I listened to her instructions, given in a quiet voice, it was quite evident that the old French proverb still holds good, "Bon sang ne peut mentir." There she was, an old, stricken mother, looking drearily into the future. Her two dear sons killed on the same day on the field of honor, her home forever desolate. But she came down, nevertheless, to show us how to bandage the wounded men, to teach us patience, endurance and control under all circumstances. At night she returns to her lonely hearth to mourn these brave boys. But did she not need our sympathy? To us, watching this superb example, she seemed to embody the spirit of courage, which admits of no defeat. The valiant heart rising above the wreck of happiness and home to do its duty to "La Patrie."