"That's just the way I felt about it," exclaimed Julie. "I nearly went crazy when I knew time was flying, winter coming, and no wheat in. I've no doubt it was the same with all the others. Then one day the news ran round like lightning that Anna was out ploughing her fields, with her kid and her grandfather to help her. Nobody took the time to go and see if it was true. Each one got out her plough. Of course, the first furrows were not very straight, but soon we got used to it, and Lord, how we laughed over my first attempts, when my husband came home the next fall on furlough." I wish that some great master of the pen might paint in words as simple as the Golden Legend, in stanzas as pure as the Litanies of the Holy Virgin, the picture of this little Julie, up and about with the first rays of dawn, always hard at work, and whom when night has closed in I have often come upon, bending over beneath her tallow candle, writing to the dear one at the front. To this task as to all the others she concentrates her every effort and attention, anxious that no news be forgotten,--news which is as fresh and naive as the events and the nature that inspires it. "The sow has had twelve little pigs, the donkey has a nail in its hoof, little Michel has a cold, and butter now sells for forty-three sous the pound." Her farm is too small and brings in too little for her to dream of taking on some one to help. But she keeps three cows, and three calves; a dozen or two pigs, a donkey and all the chickens she can afford to feed. Forty acres is quite a responsibility for so small a person, and it requires lots of courage to replace the missing muscle, to till the soil, care for the kitchen garden and the animals, and send three small children off to school on time, all of them washed and combed, without a hole in their stockings or a spot on their aprons. It needs something more than courage to be able to sing and dissimulate one's anxieties, to hide in one corner of that envelope that will be opened by him "Out there," a little favourite flower, tenderly cared for, nursed to maturity. "Bah!" she laughs as I sympathise. "It might be bad if one were all alone in his troubles. But we're all in the same boat, down here!" Yes, all of them have done their duty--more than their duty, the impossible. In other villages it is just the same--in other Provinces. From one end to the other of France such marvels have been accomplished that the government decided that so much devotion merited recompense. So one fine morning a motor was seen to stop in front of the Cafe Lacroix, a gentleman in uniform (some say it was the Prefet) accompanied by two other men, got down and walked over to the town hall that is near the church. A few moments later Criquet was dispatched on bicycle to Anna Troussiere's and Claudine Charpin's, with orders to bring them back with him.