oad, and the engineers were at
work five days after the battle.

There are but few trains--none yet on our branch road--so we had to
go to Esbly. It took two hours to get to Paris--hardly more than twelve
miles. We simply crawled most of the way. We crept through the
tunnel this side of Lagny, and then stood on this side of the Marne,
and whistled and shrieked a long time before we began to wiggle
across the unfinished bridge, with workmen hanging up on the
derricks and scaffoldings in all sorts of perilous positions, and all sorts
of grotesque attitudes. I was glad when we were over.

I found the town more normal than it was when I was there six weeks
ago. If I had not seen it in those first days of the mobilization it would
have seemed sadder than it did, and, by contrast, while it was not the
Paris that you know, it was quiet and peaceful,--no excitement of any
sort in the streets, practically no men anywhere. All the department
shops were open, but few people were in them, and very little to sell.
Many of the small shops were closed, and will be, I imagine, until the
end of the war. All the Austrian and German shops, and there were
many of them, are, of course, closed for good, making wide spaces of
closed shutters in the Avenue de l'Opera and the rue de la Paix, and
the rue Scribe, where so many of the steamship offices are. That, and
the lack of omnibuses and tramways and the scarcity of cabs, makes
the once brilliant and active quarter look quite unnatural. However, it
gives one a chance to see how really handsome it is.

A great many of the most fashionable hotels are turned to hospitals,
and everywhere, especially along the Champs-Elysees, the flags of
the Red Cross float over once gay resorts, while big white bunting
signs extend across almost every other facade, carrying the name
and number of a hospital.

Every sort of business is running short-handed, and no big office or
bank is open between the hours of noon and two o'clock.

I saw no one--there was no one to see. I finished the little business I
had to do and then I went back to the station and sat on the terrace of
the cafe opposite, and, for an hour, I watched the soldiers going in at
one gate, and the public--Indian file--presenting its papers at another.
No carriages can enter the courtyard. No one can carry anything but
hand luggage, and porters are not allowed to pass the gates, so one
had to carry one's bundles one's self across the wide, pav