these matters gradually assume in the eyes of the exiles.
Their slender incomes have to be so carefully handled to meet the strain
of even this simple way of living, if they are to show a surplus for a
little trip to the seashore in the summer months, that an extra franc a
day becomes a serious consideration.

Every now and then a family stronger-minded than the others, or with
serious reasons for returning home (a daughter to bring out or a son to
put into business), would break away from its somnolent surroundings and
re-cross the Atlantic, alternating between hope and fear. It is here
that a sad fate awaits these modern Rip Van Winkles. They find their
native cities changed beyond recognition. (For we move fast in these
days.) The mother gets out her visiting list of ten years before and is
thunderstruck to find that it contains chiefly names of the "dead, the
divorced, and defaulted." The waves of a decade have washed over her
place and the world she once belonged to knows her no more. The leaders
of her day on whose aid she counted have retired from the fray. Younger,
and alas! unknown faces sit in the opera boxes and around the dinner
tables where before she had found only friends. After a feeble little
struggle to get again into the "swim," the family drifts back across the
ocean into the quiet back water of a continental town, and goes circling
around with the other twigs and dry leaves, moral flotsam and jetsam,
thrown aside by the great rush of the outside world.

For the parents the life is not too sad. They have had their day, and
are, perhaps, a little glad in their hearts of a quiet old age, away from
the heat and sweat of the battle; but for the younger generation it is
annihilation. Each year their circle grows smaller. Death takes away
one member after another of the family, until one is left alone in a
foreign land with no ties around her, or with her far-away "home," the
latter more a name now than a reality.

A year or two ago I was taking luncheon with our consul at his primitive
villa, an hour's ride from the city of Tangier, a ride made on donkey-
back, as no roads exist in that sunny land. After our coffee and cigars,
he took me a half-hour's walk into the wilderness around him to call on
his nearest neighbors, whose mode of existence seemed a source of anxiety
to him. I found myself in the presence of two American ladies, the
younger being certainly not less than seventy-five. To