ed other pictures, too, such as the drowning see. Her
heart swelled; she sank down on the floor, laid her forehead on the
dusty carpet, and pressed her body to it.

She who did not care--who despised all peoples, even her own--began,
mechanically, to sweep together the scattered fragments of the notes,
assembling them with the dust into a little pile, as of fallen leaves,
and dabbling in it with her fingers, while the tears ran down her
cheeks. For her country she had torn them, her country in defeat! She,
who had just one shilling in this great town of enemies, who wrung her
stealthy living out of the embraces of her foes! And suddenly in the
moonlight she sat up and began to sing with all her might--"_Die Wacht
am Rhein_."

1916.

III

FLOTSAM AND JETSAM

A REMINISCENCE

The tides of the war were washing up millions of wrecked lives on all
the shores; what mattered the flotsam of a conscripted deep-sea Breton
fisherman, slowly pining away for lack of all he was accustomed to; or
the jetsam of a tall glass-blower from the 'invaded countries,' drifted
into the hospital--no one quite knew why--prisoner for twenty months
with the Boches, released at last because of his half-paralysed
tongue--What mattered they? What mattered anything, or any one, in days
like those?

Corporal Mignan, wrinkling a thin, parchmenty face, full of suffering
and kindly cynicism, used to call them '_mes deux phenomenes_.' Riddled
to the soul by gastritis, he must have found them trying roommates, with
the tricks and manners of sick and naughty children towards a
long-suffering nurse. To understand all is to forgive all, they say;
but, though he had suffered enough to understand much, Mignan was
tempted at times to deliver judgment--for example, when Roche, the
Breton fisherman, rose from his bed more than ten times in the night,
and wandered out into the little courtyard of the hospital, to look at
the stars, because he could not keep still within four walls--so
unreasonable of the '_type_.' Or when Gray, the tall glass-blower--his
grandfather had been English--refused with all the tenacity of a British
workman to wear an undervest, with the thermometer below zero,
Centigrade.

They inhabited the same room, Flotsam and Jetsam, but never spoke to one
another. And yet in all that hospital of French soldiers they were the
only two who, in a manner of speaking, had come from England. Fourteen
hundred years have passed since the B