Our personal billeting experiences have been fortunate. The house in which we have lived for many months is small as Cologne houses go, but very comfortable. As I have said before, the German house may fail in taste, but it does not fail in the practical advantages of electric light and bathrooms. Our Frau is a widow, a slight, dark, nervous woman more French than German in appearance. She knows her Europe, and travelled annually before the war in Italy and France. French is the language in which we converse. Her attitude towards us was from the first entirely correct and civil; as time went on it has become friendly and pleasant. Insensibly human and personal relations grow up when people live together month after month under the same roof. I shall be sorry to say good-bye, and I hope her recollections of us will not be unpleasant. But despite her politeness and self-control, I have always felt that few women in Cologne can be more tried by the fact of having strangers billeted on her. A housewife with an almost fanatical sense of cleanliness and order, engaged from morning till night in cleaning and tidying, the advent of the English soldiery must have been a burthen hard to bear. Yet like all her race, she accepts the situation outwardly with calm whatever her inner feelings. She was inclined to welcome our advent as we succeeded a mess, and to have a mess in your house is to the German Hausfrau a circle of Inferno to which there is only one lower stage--having black troops put in. But if our relations with Madame have always been pleasant, and I am indebted to her for many small acts of kindness, heavy weather has obtained not infrequently below stairs. The crab of our billet is Gertrude, the cross cook who has lived with Madame for many years, and has great weight with her. Gertrude is a lump of respectability, virtue, and disagreeableness. She hates the English with a complete and deadly hatred, and she leaves no stone unturned to make things uncomfortable in the basement. Hence a series of fierce feuds with a succession of soldier servants. I admit the soldier servant is apt to be a trial. How can he be otherwise? Domestic service is a skilled art, and the Army can hardly be regarded as a school for house parlourmaids. I am grieved to say that there is no guile or deception to which an officer will not stoop to secure, by fair means or foul, a batman trained in a pantry. One pearl of great price have I known, an exception to all rules. But good fellows though many of them are, the average batman is apt to be casual and inefficient. His execution among glass and crockery is deadly. I have often wondered, judging from the weekly holocaust, whether it is a rule among soldier servants to play Aunt Sally in the basement with the tall thin-stemmed German wine glasses whose days are so brief and evil. Withal they are generally good-tempered fellows, and in many houses get on quite well with the German servants.