'clock he is marching down the
hill, with his rake and hoe on his shoulder, to help his neighbors.

There is many a woman working in the fields to-day who was not trained
to it. I have a neighbor, a rich peasant, whose two sons are at the
front. Her only daughter married an officer in the Engineer Corps.
When her husband joined his regiment she came home to her mother with
her little boy. I see her every day, in a short skirt and a big hat,
leading her boy by the hand, going to the fields to help her mother. If
you don't think that is fine, I do. It is only one of many cases right
under my eyes.

There are old men here who thought that their days of hard work were
over, who are in the fields working like boys. There is our
blacksmith--old Pere Marie--lame with rheumatism, with his
white-haired wife working in the fields from sunrise to sunset. He
cheerfully limps up the hill in his big felt slippers, his wife
carrying the lunch basket, and a tiny black-and-tan English dog called
"Missy," who is the family baby, and knows lots of tricks, trotting
behind, "because," as he says, "she is so much company." The old
blacksmith is a veteran of 1870, and was for a long time a prisoner at
Konigsburg. He likes nothing better than to rest a bit on a big stone
at my gate and talk of 1870. Like all Frenchmen of his type he is
wonderfully intelligent, full of humor, and an omnivorous reader.
Almost every day he has a bit of old newspaper in his pocket out of
which he reads to la dame Americaine as he calls me, not being able to
pronounce my name. It is usually something illuminating about the
Germans, when it is not something prophetic. It is wonderful how these
old chaps take it all to heart.

All the time my heart is out there in the northeast. It is not my
country nor my war--yet I feel as if it were both. All my French
friends are there, all my neighbors, and any number of English friends
will soon be, among them the brother of the sculptor you met at my house
last winter and liked so much. He is with the Royal Field Artillery.
His case is rather odd. He came back to England in the spring, after
six years in the civil service, to join the army. His leave expired
just in time for him to reenter the army and see his first active
service in this war. Fortunately men seem to take it all as a matter of
course. That consoles some, I find.

I have just heard that there are two trains a day on which civilians can
go u