smitten. On the door of the large room that we
chose for the mess there still remained a request in French, written in
a clear painstaking hand, that billeted officers should keep to the
linoleum strips laid across the carpet when proceeding to the two inner
rooms. But there was no linoleum now, and no carpet. On the otherwise
bare wall was hung a massively-framed portrait of the proprietor--a
clean-shaven middle-aged Frenchman of obviously high intelligence. A
family press-cutting album contained an underlined report from a local
newspaper of a concert given in the village on June 6, 1914:--

_Tres remarque le duo de mandoline avec accompagnement de violon
execute par trois gracieuses jeunes filles qui font a chacune de
nos soirees admirer par les amateurs du beau, leur talent
d'artiste!_

I gathered that the three young girls were daughters of the house; I
also noted that _trois gracieuses jeunes filles_ was doubly
underlined.

One of our servants used to be a professional gardener, and in a couple
of days he had weeded the paths and brought skill and knowledge to bear
on the neglected vegetable beds. We had excellent salad from that
garden and fresh strawberries, while there were roses to spare for the
tall vases on the mantelpiece in the mess; and before we came away our
gardener had looked to the future and planted lettuce and turnips and
leeks, and even English pansies. The Boche gunners never got a line on
to that house, and though aeroplanes cruised above us every night not a
single bomb dropped near.

The town major, a learned and discursive subaltern, relieved on account
of rheumatic troubles from more strenuous duties with an Infantry
regiment, joined our mess and proved a valuable addition. He was a
talented mathematician whose researches had carried him to where
mathematics soar into the realms of imagination; he had a horror of
misplaced relatives, and possessed a reliable palate in the matter of
red wines. One dinner-time he talked himself out on the possibilities
of the metric system, and pictured the effects of a right angle with a
hundred instead of ninety degrees. Another night he walked me up and
down the garden until 2 A.M., expatiating on astronomy. He tried to
make me realise the beyond comprehension remoteness of the new star by
explaining that astronomers did not calculate its distance from the
earth in thousands of miles. "Light travels at 186,000 miles a second;
to astron