polite
flutters of applause punctuated the talk, and at the end M. Cestre
asked his audience to rise as he paid his final tribute to the people
now fighting the common battle with France. They all stood up and,
smiling up at the left-hand proscenium-box, saluted the British
ambassador, Sir Francis Bertie, with long and enthusiastic applause. A
man in the gallery even ventured a "Heep! heep!" and every one drifted
out very content, indeed.

In the foyer I saw one lady carefully spelling out with her lorgnette
one of the words on the list posted there of the subjects for
conferences.

"Ah!" she said, considerably reassured apparently, "Keepling!" But then
she may have come in late.

Thursday.

The war has been hard on the main business of the neighborhood, of
course--Germany was the heaviest buyer of Bordeaux wine, Russia next,
and not as much as usual is going to England. The vintage this year,
like that of 70, is said to be good, however, and, though the young men
have gone, and the wine-making was not as gay as usual, there were
enough old men and women left to do the work. I visited one of the
older wine houses--nearly two centuries old--and tramped through cellars
which burrow on two levels under a whole city block. There were some
two million bottles down there in the dark and dust.

There is something patriarchal and princely about such a house, almost
unknown in our businesses at home--from the portraits of the founders,
from the caskmakers, at lunch-time, broiling their own fish over a huge
fireplace and drawing wine from the common cask as they have done for
generations; the stencils in the shipping-room--"Baltimore," "Bogota,"
"Buenos Aires," "Chicago," "Calcutta," "Christiania," "Caracas"--from
things like these to the personality and point of view of the men who
have the business in charge.

"Now, wine," began the charming gentleman who showed us round, "is a
living thing." And though you could see that he had showed many people
about in his day--and was not unaware of what might interest them--that
he was, in short, an advertiser of the most accomplished kind, yet one
could also see that he liked his work and believed in it, and grew wine
as an amateur grows fancy tulips and not as a mere salesman.

To be sure, he was inclined to slur over the importance of white wine,
while champagne and its perfidious makers didn't interest him in the
least; but of the red wine of Bordeaux, its lightness, b