e incident
in the cafe. I took the view that the lady was wrong in increasing the
price so rapidly. The agent agreed gravely. I then pointed out that the
Australian was a very large-sized man, and that in spite of his quietude
he was a man in the habit of killing Germans. He also had a curious
dislike of policemen.

"It appears to me," I said, politely, "that for the sake of your health
the other end of the street is better than this."

The agent de police released his grip from the Australian's wrist and
saluted me.

"Vous avez raison, monsieur. Je vous remercie. Ces Australiens sont
vraiment formidables, n'est-ce pas?"

He disappeared through the crowd, who were smiling with a keen sense of
understanding. Only the lady of the estaminet was unappeased.

"They are bandits, these Australians!" she said to the world about her.

The tall Australian shook hands with me in a comradely way.

"Thanks for your trouble," he said. "It was the injustice I couldn't
stick. I always pay the right price. I come from Australia."

I watched him go slouching down the rue des Trois Cailloux, head above
all the passers-by. He would be at Pozieres again next day.

VII

I was billeted for a time with other war correspondents in an old house
in the rue Amiral Courbet, on the way to the river Somme from the Street
of the Three Pebbles, and with a view of the spire of the cathedral, a
wonderful thing of delicate lines and tracery, graven with love in every
line, by Muirhead Bone, and from my dormer window. It was the house of
Mme. de la Rochefoucauld, who lived farther out of the town, but drove
in now and then to look at this little mansion of hers at the end of a
courtyard behind wrought-iron gates. It was built in the days before
the Revolution, when it was dangerous to be a fine lady with the name
of Rochefoucauld. The furniture was rather scanty, and was of the Louis
Quinze and Empire periods. Some portraits of old gentlemen and ladies of
France, with one young fellow in a scarlet coat, who might have been
in the King's Company of the Guard about the time when Wolfe scaled the
Heights of Abraham, summoned up the ghosts of the house, and I liked to
think of them in these rooms and going in their sedan-chairs across the
little courtyard to high mass at the cathedral or to a game of bezique
in some other mansion, still standing in the quiet streets of Amiens,
unless in a day in March of 1918 they were destroyed with many hu