ntry behind. Neither of the chambers is in session, and except
that the main streets are busy--one is told that one hundred thousand
extra people are in town--you might almost never know that anything out
of the ordinary had occurred. Things must be very different, of course,
from '71, when, beaten to her knees and threatened with revolution,
France had to decide between surrendering Alsace and Lorraine and going
on with the war.

The theatres are closed, but there are moving-picture shows, an
occasional concert, and twice a week, under the auspices of one of the
newspapers, a conference. I went to one of these, given by a French
professor of English literature in the University of Bordeaux, on the
timely subject: "Kipling and Greater England."

You can imagine the piquant interest of the scene--the polite matinee
audience, the row of erudite Frenchmen sitting behind the speaker, the
table, the shaded lamp, and the professor himself, a slender, dark
gentleman with a fine, grave face, pointed black beard, and penetrating
eyes--suggesting vaguely a prestidigitateur--trying, by sheer
intelligence and delicate, critical skill, to bridge the gaps of race
and instinctive thought and feeling and make his audience understand
Kipling.

Said the reporter of one of the Bordeaux papers next day: "Through the
Kipling evoked by M. Cestre we admired the English and those who fight,
in the great winds of the North Sea, that combat rude and brave. We
admired the faithful indigenes, gathering from all her dominions, to put
their muscular arms at the service of the empire..."

It would, indeed, have been difficult to pay a more graceful compliment
to the entente cordiale than to try to run the author of "Soldiers
Three" and the "Barrack Room Ballads," and with him the nation behind
him, into the smooth mould of a conference--that mixture, so curiously
French, of clear thinking and graceful expression, of sensitive
definition and personal charm, all blended into a whole so
intellectually neat and modulated that an audience like this may take it
with the same sense of being cheered, yet not inebriated, with which
their allies across the Channel take their afternoon tea.

A Frenchman of a generation ago would scarcely have recognized the
England pictured by the amiable Bordeaux professor, and I am not sure
that in this entirely altruistic big brother of little nations the
English would have recognized themselves. But, at any rate,