So it was that Christmas Day at Vichy was a particularly gay one--gay, despite even the pain and suffering that remained in all the great hospital wards there. For men--American men, if you please, could, and did, hide for the nonce their fearful suffering. Pain begone! The carols were in the air. The hundreds of gayly decorated electric-light bulbs were flashing on at dusk. And you might go from ward to ward and there count all of fifty Christmas trees--these, too, brilliantly decorated. And the decorators in all these instances had been Red Cross women and men--and wounded soldiers lying ill at ease in their hospital cots. They made a great job of all of it--a merry job as well. And when the supplies of such conventional raw materials as tinsel and popcorn fell short they seemed to find something else that did quite as well. For that hospital celebration among our wounded men at Vichy just 13,657 socks were filled, which bespeaks the exact number of doughboys that participated in the celebration. If they could have spoken, each of these humble articles of clothing might easily have told a double story--the tale of its own origin and the romance that came to it after that memorable Christmas Day; for they were American knit socks, and no factory--no inanimate, impersonal place, peopled with machines rather than with humans--had turned them forth. Each and every one of them were hand-knitted. And some of them had come from my lady's parlor, situated in an upper floor, perhaps, of a great and gaudy apartment house, and some had come from the prairie ranch, and some had come from cabins upon the steep and desolate mountainsides of the Alleghenies or the Rockies or the Sierras. From East and West and North and South they had come--but all had come from the United States; and I am perfectly willing to predict that every blessed one returned forthwith to the land of its birth. The mate of each one of these 13,657 socks was rolled and placed in its toe. Then followed other things--shaving soap, cigarettes, tobacco, nuts, candy, handkerchiefs--by this time you ought to know the Red Cross list as well as I. While, by connivance with the head nurse of each of the wards, each blessed sock was individually tagged and addressed to its recipient. There is nothing, you know, like personal quality in a Christmas gift. * * * * *