many boxes
and bundles, bags and bales, remaining aloft by such remarkable laws of
equilibrium that I feared lest any moment they fall upon our heads, and
once this catastrophe occurred there seemed to be little hope of
extricating oneself from beneath the ruins.

The conversation was opened by the Norman farmer who offered to relieve
the little old woman of her basket and set it safely between his feet.

"_Oh, non merci_," she piped in a thin little wavering treble, and an
inimitable accent which made it impossible to guess her origin.

"Oh, no, Monsieur, thank you," she continued. "It's full of cream
tarts and cherry tarts, and custard pies made right in our own home.
I'm taking them to my boy, and as we stayed up very late to make them
so that they would be quite fresh, I should hate to have any of them
crushed or broken. He did love them so when he was little!"

"Our son was just the same. As soon as he was able to eat he begged
them to let him have some _brioche_. But his fever was too high when
we got there, and he couldn't take a thing. 'That doesn't matter,' he
said to his mother. 'Just the sight of them makes my mouth water, and
I feel better already.'"

My Provencal neighbour could no longer resist. His natural
loquaciousness got the better of his reserve.

"Well, the first thing my son asked for was olives, so I brought him
enough to last, as well as some sausage which he used to relish. Oh,
if only I could bring him a little bit of our blue sky, I'm sure he
would recover twice as quickly."

The mother of the young girl now sat forward and asked the Norman
farmer's wife where and how her son had been wounded.

"He had a splinter of shell in his left thigh. He'd been through the
whole campaign without a scratch or a day of illness."

The woman's eyes sparkled with pride and tenderness.

The short man beside me, who informed me he was a native of Beaucaire
on the Rhone, had one son wounded and being cared for in a hospital at
Caen, a second prisoner in Germany, and two sons-in-law already killed.

According to a letter which the dear old flowered shawl spelled out to
us word by word, her grandson had been wounded in seven different
places, and had had one hand and one leg amputated. But he hastened to
add that he was not worrying a bit about it.

The young girl's mother had one son in the ranks, and a second, aged
seventeen, had enlisted and was about to leave for the front. She and
he