side.

I could not help asking myself, even while I wiped tears of laughter
from my eyes, if most of the people I saw flying four weeks ago might
not have found themselves in the same fix when it came to taking
stock of what was saved and what was lost.

I remember so well being at Aix-les-Bains, in 1899, when the Hotel du
Beau-Site was burned, and finding a woman in a wrapper sitting on a
bench in the park in front of the burning hotel, with the lace waist of
an evening frock in one hand, and a small bottle of alcohol in the
other. She explained to me, with some emotion, that she had gone
back, at the risk of her life, to get the bottle from her dressing-table,
"for fear that it would explode!"

It did not take me half an hour to get my effects in order, but poor
Amelie's disgust seems to increase with time. You can't deny that if I
had been drummed out and came back to find my house a ruin, my
books and pictures destroyed, and only those worthless bits of china
and plated ware to "start housekeeping again," it would have been
humorous. Real humor is only exaggeration. That would surely have
been a colossal exaggeration.

It is not the first time I have had to ask myself, seriously, "Why this
mania for possession?" The ferryman on the Styx is as likely to take it
across as our railroad is to "handle" it today. Yet nothing seems able
to break a person born with that mania for collecting.

I stood looking round at it all when everything was in place, and I
realized that if the disaster had come, I should have found it easy to
reconcile myself to it in an epoch where millions were facing it with
me. It is the law of Nature. Material things, like the friends we have
lost, may be eternally regretted. They cannot be eternally grieved for.
We must "--be up and doing, With a heart for any fate."

All the same, it was a queer twist in the order of my life, that, hunting
in all directions for a quiet retreat in which to rest my weary spirit, I
should have ended by deliberately sitting myself down on the edge of
a battlefield,--even though it was on the safe edge,--and stranger still,
that there I forgot that my spirit was weary.

We are beginning to pick up all sorts of odd little tales of the
adventures of some of the people who had remained at Voisin. One
old man there, a mason, who had worked on my house, had a very
queer experience. Like all the rest of them, he went on working in the
fields all through the menacing