, with the help of generous money subsidies
coming, month by month, from one rich American woman--a woman of San
Francisco--across the Atlantic. How one envies that American woman!

The sight of Miss Polk at work lives indeed, a warm memory, in one's
heart. She has established herself in two tiny rooms in a peasant's
cottage, which have been made just habitable for her. A few touches of
bright colour, a picture or two, a book or two, some flowers, with
furniture of the simplest--amid these surroundings on the outskirts of
the ruined village, with one of its capable, kindly faced women to run
the _menage_, Miss Polk lives and works, realising bit by bit the plans
of the new Vitrimont, which have been drawn for her by the architect of
the department, and following loyally old Lorraine traditions. The
church has been already restored and reopened. The first mass within its
thronged walls was--so the spectators say--a moving sight. "_That sad
word--Joy_"--Landor's pregnant phrase comes back to one, as expressing
the bitter-sweet of all glad things in this countryside, which has
seen--so short a time ago--death and murder and outrage at their worst.
The gratitude of the villagers to their friend and helper has taken
various forms. The most public mark of it, so far, has been Miss Folk's
formal admission to the burgess rights of Vitrimont, which is one of the
old communes of France. And the village insists that she shall claim her
rights! When the time came for dividing the communal wood in the
neighbouring forest, her fellow citizens arrived to take her with them
and show her how to obtain her share. As to the affection and confidence
with which she is regarded, it was enough to walk with her through the
village, to judge of its reality.

But it makes one happy to think that it is not only Americans who have
done this sort of work in France. Look, for instance, at the work of the
Society of Friends in the department of the Marne,--on that fragment of
the battlefield which extends from Bar-le-Duc to Vitry St. Francois. "Go
and ask," wrote a French writer in 1915, "for the village of Huiron, or
that of Glannes, or that other, with its name to shudder at, splashed
with blood and powder--Sermaize. Inquire for the English Quakers. Books,
perhaps, have taught you to think of them as people with long black
coats and long faces. Where are they? Here are only a band of workmen,
smooth-faced--not like our country folk. They laugh and