There might also have been pictures in those selfsame comfort bags of the Red Cross girls on the stone platforms of the railroad station--young women who in warm days served iced lemonade there and in cold, hot chocolate, or, when it was requested, hot lemonade; for the fact remains that lemonade was the only food or drink that many of the gassed cases could endure. And it was ready for them there--at all hours of the day or night, and at all days; even though to make that possible the girl workers would sometimes stay on duty for thirty-six hours at a stretch: without having the opportunity of divesting themselves of their clothing and so gaining a little real rest. A final picture of Vichy might have well been a mental photograph of the "hut." This formerly had been the Elysée Palace--a gaming and amusement center of none too savory a reputation; yet with its central location on the main street, its ample lounging space, and its small theater, self-contained, it was ideal for the purposes of our Red Cross and so became a living heart of Vichy. It was the canteen or club in which some five thousand doughboys were wont to congregate each day--to write letters home, to play games, or the tireless piano, to read the newspapers or the magazines, to visit, to gossip--in every way possible to shorten days that passed none too quickly for any of them. During the first months of its organization this Red Cross superhut did not include the entire "Palace." Gradually it spread, however, until the entire two floors of the place were busy with American Red Cross activities. And the doughboy passing from the comfortable clubrooms on the main floor--wherein, for the comfort of the convalescents, a full-fledged army commissary had been set up--upstairs found a "first-aid" room of a new sort. It was, in fact, an operating room, where expert surgery might be applied to torn and ripped and otherwise wounded uniforms. And the head surgeon was a woman--a smart, black-eyed French seamstress who could perform wonders not alone with torn buttonholes but who also possessed a facility with a hot sadiron that made her tremendously popular upon the eve of certain festal occasions. * * * * * "How would a dish of Yankee ice cream taste to-day? You know, the same sort that Blink & Smith serve down there in the Universal, at the corner of Main and First streets?"