ells tolling people to church.

Up the long hill, as I went down, came three hearses in black and
silver, after the French fashion, with drivers in black coats and
black-and-silver cocked hats. People stopped as they passed, a woman
crossed herself, men took off their hats--farther up the hill a French
sentry suddenly straightened and presented arms.

The three caskets were draped in flags--not the tricolor, but the Union
Jack. No mourners followed them, and as the ancient vehicles climbed
over the brow of the hill the people kept looking, feeling, perhaps,
that something was lacking, wondering who the strangers might be who had
given their lives to France.

Monday.

Paris again--a gray Paris, with bare tree-trunks, dead leaves on the
sidewalk, and in the air the chill of approaching winter.

Across the gray distances one fancies now and then to have seen the
first stray flakes of snow, and in some old street, between tall, gray
houses leaning backward, sidewise, each after its fashion--as some girl,
pale, with shawl wrapped about her shoulders, hurries past with a quick
upcasting of dark eyes, one thinks of Mimi and the third act of "La
Boheme."

Old sentiments, old songs and verses return in this strange, gray
stillness--that spirit so gracious, delicate, penetrating, and personal,
which has drawn so many through the years, becomes more moving and real.
There is more animation in the streets now: shops are opening, cabs
tooting down the Avenue de l'Opera the greater part of the night; but
most of the house-fronts are still shuttered and still. Tourists,
pleasure-seekers, and the banalities they bring are gone--every thought
and energy is with the men fighting on that long line across the north.
It is a Paris of the French--of a France united as never before,
perhaps, purified by fire, ardent, resolute, defending her life and her
precious inheritance.

The Temporary Capital

Tuesday.

A journalist actually protests in print against the big loaves of coarse
bread, long as half a stick of cord-wood and almost as hard--remember
the almost carnivorous joy with which a Frenchman devours bread!--to
which the military government, at the beginning of the war, condemned
Paris.

The explanation was that rolls and fancy bread took too much time and
there were not enough bakers left to do the work--and inspectors see
that the law is obeyed, whether amiable bakers think they have time or
not. And people wa