He or one of his assistants (for it always seemed to me that half the French Army helped to carry his papers round for him) it was that first introduced us to the fascinations of the ring-making industry. It appears that an industrious Frenchman, one supposes a jeweller by trade, early in the war hit upon the idea of collecting the fuses of hostile shells that fell near him, melting down the aluminium of which they are largely made, and casting it into rings, which he ornamented by letting in pieces of brass or copper, also components of the fuse. The practice spread like wildfire through the French troops, it gave a congenial occupation to their busy fingers, and brought them a gratifying increase of income. Our men were at first ready customers--there was little enough for them to spend money upon, the inhabitants had been cleared out of the surrounding villages, and no civilian population means no _estaminets_. But some of the more commercially-minded among us--the whole story is as a microcosm of our commercial supremacy as a nation--loath to see this profitable trade passing them by, determined to enter into competition. The first experiments were dramatic enough. A band of telephonists collected a large store of wood torn from ruined houses, and of coal, fetched at no small risk from a mine that was usually under fire, in the observation post, which happened then to be a fairly large house well back from the hostile lines, so that a fire was allowed in the telephonists' room. Here one evening they collected, like a band of alchemists for the fusion of the Philosopher's Stone, and here I chanced upon them, the room lit only by the glare of a huge fire, around which they all crouched, their eyes fixed upon a saucepan that held in its depths one small fuse, which the Master of the Black Arts periodically poked enquiringly with the point of his bayonet. I believe that attempt ended in the necessity for a sudden and disastrous quenching, brought about by the fact that the house itself showed ominous signs of catching fire. After many vicissitudes the art became centred in the battery cooks, who, having the unfair advantage that in the natural course of events they worked by a fire all day, formed a sort of Guild of Ring Makers, and some very creditable work was produced. Their first step was to undersell the French, and they succeeded to such an extent that the cook-house became a miniature Birmingham, and orders had to be placed early to secure delivery. Souvenirs these rings became in a land where everybody seems to ask everybody else for a "souvenir," a term that has become so wide that it covers everything portable. One day I was standing in a doorway when surely the youngest soldier in the French army--he could not have been more than fourteen; I suppose he was a drummer boy, but how he reached so close to the firing line has always puzzled me--passed me and saluted gravely. My smile must