ghted stations. Saluting Napoleon's
statue, I strolled up the rue de la Paix, took a table on a cafe
pavement, and, ordering a glass of something fizzy for the form of it,
sat content and happy, watching the whole gigantic pageant of Paris in
war-time defile before my eyes.

The Cook's tourists and their like, bane of the past, had disappeared;
but all nationalities that the world holds seemed to be about. At the
next table two Russian officers, with high cheek-bones and wide-set
eyes, were drinking, chatting together in their purring, unintelligible
tongue. Beyond them a party of Englishmen in khaki, cool-mannered, clear
of gaze, were talking in low tones of the spring offensive. The uniforms
of France swarmed round me in all their variety, and close at hand a
general, gorgeous in red and blue and gold, sat with his hand resting
affectionately on the knee of a lad in the horizon blue of a simple
poilu, who was so like him that I guessed them at a glance for father
and son.

A cab drew up before me, and a Belgian officer with crutches was helped
out by the cafe starter, who himself limped slightly and wore two medals
on his breast. First one troop and then another defiled across the Place
l'Opera: a company of infantry with bayonets mounted, a picturesque
regiment of Moroccans, turbaned, of magnificently impassive bearing,
sitting their horses like images of bronze. Men of the Flying Corps,
in dark blue with wings on their sleeves, strolled past me; and once,
roused by exclamations and pointing fingers, I looked up to see a
monoplane, light and graceful as a darting bird, skimming above our
heads.

Even the faces had a different look, the voices a different ring. It was
another country from that of the days of peace. Superb and dauntless,
tried by the most searing of fires and not found wanting, France was
standing girt with her shining armor, barring the invader from her
cities, her villages, her homes.

Deep in my heart--too deep to be talked of often--there had lain always
a tenderness for this heroic France. "A man's other country," some wise
person had christened it; and so it was for me, since by a chance I had
been born here, and since here my father and then my mother had died. I
was glad I had run the gauntlet and had reached Paris to do my part in
a mighty work. An ambulance drove heavily past me, and with a thrill I
wondered how soon I should bend over such a steering wheel, within sound
of the great gun