nce
August, 1914, and the landlord has no power to collect. Add to this
the ever increasing price of living, and you will understand why many
an elderly Parisian who counted on spending his declining years in
peace and plenty, is now hard at work earning his daily bread.

Made in a moment of emergency, evidently with the intention that it be
of short duration, this law about rentals has become the most
perplexing question in the world. Several attempts have been made
towards a solution, but all have remained fruitless, unsanctioned; and
the property owners are becoming anxious.

That men who have been mobilised shall not pay--that goes without
saying. But the others. How about them?

I happen to know a certain house in a bourgeois quarter of the city
about which I have very special reasons for being well informed.

Both stores are closed. The one was occupied by a book-seller, the
other by a boot-maker. Each dealer was called to the army, and both of
them have been killed. Their estates will not be settled until after
the war.

The first floor was rented to a middle-aged couple. The husband,
professor in a city school, is now prisoner in Germany. His wife died
during the Winter just passed.

On the second landing one entered the home of a cashier in a big
National Bank. He was the proud possessor of a wife and three pretty
babies. The husband, aged thirty-two, left for the front with the rank
of Lieutenant, the first day of the mobilisation. His bank kindly
consented to continue half salary during the war. The lieutenant was
killed at Verdun. His employers offered a year and a half's pay to the
young widow--that is to say, about six thousand dollars, which she
immediately invested in five per cent government rentes. A
lieutenant's yearly pension amounts to about three hundred dollars, and
the Legion of Honour brings in fifty dollars per annum.

They had scarcely had time to put anything aside, and I doubt if he
carried a life insurance. At any rate the education of these little
boys will take something more than can be economised after the bare
necessities of life have been provided. So how is the brave little
woman even to think of paying four years' rent, which when computed
would involve more than two-thirds of her capital?

The third floor tenant is an elderly lady who let herself be persuaded
to put her entire income into bonds of the City of Vienna, Turkish
debt, Russian roubles, and the