eat
public charity, but they could sprinkle about a few private good deeds,
in remembrance of Jim, who loved the place, as he loved all the
Ile-de-France. One of Mother Beckett's most valued letters from
"Jim-on-his-travels" (as she always says) is from Noyon, and she was so
bent on reading it aloud to us, as we drove slowly--almost
reverently--into the town, that she wouldn't look (I believe she even
grudged our looking!) at the facade of the far-famed Hotel de Ville,
until she'd come to the end of the last page. She seemed to think that
to look up prematurely would be like wanting to see the stage before the
curtain rose on the play!

I loved her for it--we all loved her--and obeyed as far as possible. But
one couldn't shut one's eyes to the Stars and Stripes that flapped on
the marvellously ornate front of the old building--flapped like the
wings of the American Eagle that has flown across the Atlantic to help
save France.

Jim--a son of the Eagle--who gave his life for this land and for
liberty, would have felt proud of that flag, I think, if he could have
seen it to-day: for because she is the adopted child of Washington,
Noyon "stars" the emblem of her American mother. She hangs out no other
flag--not even that of France--on the Hotel de Ville. Maybe she'll give
her own colours a place there later, but at this moment the Star
Spangled Banner floats alone in its glory.

No nice, normal-minded person could remember, or morbidly want to
remember, the name unkindly given by Julius Caesar to Noyon, when he had
besieged it. I can imagine even Charlemagne waving that cumbrous label
impatiently aside, though Noyon mixed with Laon was his first capital.
"Noviodunum Belgarum it may have been" (I dare say he said). "But _I'm_
going to call it Noyon!"

He was crowned king of Austria in Noyon cathedral--an even older one
than the cathedral of to-day, which the Germans have generously omitted
to destroy, merely stealing all its treasures! But I feel sure he
doesn't feel Austrian in these days, if he is looking down over the
"Blessed Damosel's" shoulder, to see what's going on here below. He
belonged really to the whole world. Why, didn't that fairy-story king,
Haroun al Raschid, send him from Bagdad the "keys of the tomb of
Christ," as Chief of the Christian World? They say his ghost haunts
Noyon, and was always there whenever a king was crowned, or elected--as
Hugh Capet was. Perhaps it may have been Charlemagne in the sp