assure you that she loves her husband. She would be drawn and
quartered before she would harm him. If anything happens to him she
will weep bitterly. But, under my breath, I can assure you that there is
many a woman of that class a widow today who is better off for it, and
so are her children. The husband who died "en hero," the father dead
for his country, is a finer figure in the family life than the living man
ever was or could have been.

Of course, it is in the middle classes, where the wives have to be
kept, where marriage is less a partnership than in the working classes
and among the humbler commercial classes, that there is so much
suffering. But that is the class which invariably suffers most in any
disaster.

I do not know how characteristic of the race the qualities I find among
these people are, nor can I, for lack of experience, be sure in what
degree they are absolutely different from those of any class in the
States. For example--this craving to own one's home. Almost no one
here pays rent. There is a lad at the foot of the hill, in Voisins, who
was married just before the war. He has a tiny house of two rooms
and kitchen which he bought just before his marriage for the sum of
one hundred and fifty francs--less than thirty dollars. He paid a small
sum down, and the rest at the rate of twenty cents a week. There is a
small piece of land with it, on which he does about as intensive
farming as I ever saw. But it is his own.

The woman who works in my garden owns her place. She has been
paying for it almost ever since she was married,--sixteen years ago,--
and has still forty dollars to pay. She cultivates her own garden, raises
her own chickens and rabbits, and always has some to sell. Her
husband works in the fields for other people, or in the quarries, and
she considers herself prosperous, as she has been able to keep her
children in school, and owes no one a penny, except, of course, the
sum due on her little place. She has worked since she was nine, but
her children have not, and, when she dies, there will be something for
them, if it is no more than the little place. In all probability, before
that time comes, she will have bought more land--to own ground is
the dream of these people, and they do it in such a strange way.

I remember in my girlhood, when I knew the Sandy River Valley
country so well, that when a farmer wanted to buy more land he
always tried, at no matter what sacrifice, to get a p