near houses in this district, but Pere was very nervous, and
every time the dog barked he was out in the road to make sure that I
was all right.

Oddly enough, it happened on the very day when two hundred
arrived at Meaux to work in the sugar refinery. The next day there
was a regular battue, as the gendarmes beat up the fields and woods
in search of the fugitives.

If they caught them, they don't tell, but we have been ordered to
harbor no strangers under a severe penalty. But that condition has
really existed since the war broke out, as no one is even allowed to
engage a workman whose papers have not been vise at the mairie.

I have had to have a wood fire today--it is alarming, with winter
ahead, and so little fuel, to have to begin heating up at the end of
September--three weeks or a month earlier than usual.

XXVIII

November 25, 1916

It is raining,--a cold and steady downpour. I don't feel in the least like
writing a letter. This is only to tell you that I have got enough
anthracite coal to go to the end of February, and that the house is
warm and cosy, and I am duly thankful to face this third war-winter
free from fear of freezing. It cost thirty-two dollars a ton. How does
that sound to you?

I have planted my tulip bulbs, cleaned up the garden for winter and
settled down to life inside my walls, with my courage in both hands,
and the hope that next spring's offensive will not be a great
disappointment.

In the meantime I am sorry that Franz Josef did not live to see this
war of his out and take his punishment. I used to be so sorry for him
in the old days, when it seemed as if Fate showered disasters on the
heads of the Hapsburgs. I wasted my pity. The blows killed everyone
in the family but father. The way he stood it and never learned to be
kind or wise proved how little he needed pity.

All the signs say a cold winter. How I envy hibernating animals! I want
to live to see this thing out, but it would be nice to crawl into a hole,
like a bear, and sleep comfortably until the sun came out in the
spring, and the seeds began to sprout, and the army was thawed out,
and could move. In the silence on this hilltop, where nothing happens
but dishwashing and bedmaking and darning stockings, it is a long
way to springtime, even if it comes early.

I amused myself last week by defying the consign. I had not seen a
gendarme on the road for weeks. I had driven to Couilly once or
twice, though t