Glancing through one of the remaining panes of a window by the door, I saw a glass jar containing a couple of sticks of chocolate, beside it three jars of jelly, a box of French matches, a blue paper packet of half a dozen candles, a score of small oranges in one box, and in another, alongside it, seven or eight very dry-looking kippers. Peering through the partly-obscured glass one could see a stolid-looking, red-faced, albino-haired woman. "Business as usual," with a vengeance! Such an odd curiosity shop as this was not to be passed without examination, so I entered and talked to the woman. Her whole stock-in-trade was what I had seen through the window. She was cheerful enough, though she huddled for warmth over a fire by which sat a despondent-looking brother. She chatted laconically about the situation, and told me she had been there continuously throughout the fighting. The shell that hit the building was a shrapnel and came a month before. Shells still came near, now and again, but that fact seemed to be accepted by her as inevitable and not to be worried about. These people had no means of existence except the sale of their pitiable bits of provisions. They were in daily danger of their lives. Yet they stayed on--odd folk. Typical Belgians. The gun-fire dropped, then began again spasmodically. I could hear the snipers at work. In the gathering twilight the rattle of rifle fire and the storm of the rapid-fire guns sounded clearly on the left. A fusillade on the right reminded me that the Ypres position was a salient. Directly in front, down that Menin Road, which had seen the taking of so many tens of thousands of lives during the past months, a roll of rifle fire made waves of sound. Night fell, cold and damp. The making of a light was not permitted; so I waited in the dark, watching the night lights rise and fall over the trenches, until the General and Colonel Home returned, when we ran back to Ypres for dinner. My first four days in Ypres were uneventful. On the fifth, I went up into the trenches, and saw more of actual trench conditions than I had seen for some time. Our daily round led me out on the Menin Road, well towards Hooge, or to Potijze on the Zonnebeke Road, several times each day. Shells went over us now and again. Rarely did a day pass when the Huns did not bombard the railway station in Ypres. As we were quartered in the eastern edge of the town the shells aimed at the station bothered us but little. Sometimes a Black Maria lit on the moat wall, where we walked at times, but we timed our exercise so that our promenade and the arrival of the big shells never coincided. Once or twice bits of shell fell over the Headquarters buildings, or rattled down on our paved courtyard, but rarely. Every morning saw Ypres wrapped in a snow mantle, which was turned before noontide, to a coverlet of black mud. No fires were allowed, except small wood blazes in the open, as smoke from a chimney would have invited a shell.