part of the world helps to keep famous and familiar,
and had reached the outskirts of the city. Here the banks are close
together, so close that one almost can hail those on shore; but there
was a heavy rain and the mist played tricks.

When I saw a man in a black overcoat with the brass buttons wider apart
across the chest than at the belt line, like those of our traffic police
in summer-time, I thought it was a trick of the mist. Because the
uniform that, by a nice adjustment of buttons, tries to broaden the
shoulders and decrease the waist, is not being worn much in France. Not
if a French sharpshooter sees it first.

But the man in the overcoat was not carrying a rifle on his shoulder.
He was carrying a bag of cement, and from the hull of the barge others
appeared, each with a bag upon his shoulder. There was no mistaking
them. Nor their little round caps, high boots, and field uniforms of
gray-green.

It was strange that the first persons we should see since we left the
wharf at the foot of Fifteenth Street, North River, the first we should
see in France, should not be French people, but German soldiers.

Bordeaux had the good taste to burn down when the architect who designed
the Place de la Concorde, in Paris, and the buildings facing it was
still alive; and after his designs, or those of his pupils, Bordeaux was
rebuilt. So wherever you look you see the best in what is old and the
smartest in what is modern.

Certainly when to that city President Poincare and his cabinet moved the
government, they gave it a resting-place that was both dignified and
charming. To walk the streets and wharfs is a continual delight. One is
never bored. It is like reading a book in which there are no dull pages.

Everywhere are the splendid buildings of Louis XV, statues, parks,
monuments, churches, great arches that once were the outer gates, and
many miles of quays redolent, not of the sea, but of the wine to which
the city gives her name.

But to-day to walk the streets of Bordeaux saddens as well as delights.
There are so many wounded. There are so many women and children all in
black. It is a relief when you learn that the wounded are from different
parts of France, that they have been sent to Bordeaux to recuperate and
are greatly in excess of the proportion of wounded you would find in
other cities.

But the women and children in black are not convalescents. Their wounds
heal slowly, or not at all.

At the wharfs a