ffet, a stove, kitchen
furnishings, blankets, linen, and crockery. There were even window
curtains. The railway authorities had reduced freight rates for their
benefit fifty per cent; and at that time (July, 1916) they had rescued
the poor of four wrecked villages from reeking cellars and filthy
straw and given some poor poilus a home to come to during their six
days' leave of absence from the Front.

The Marquise de Ganay and the Comtesse de Bryas, two of the most
active members, are on duty in the offices of their neat little
exhibition for several hours every day, and it was becoming one of the
cheerful sights of Paris.

There is little left of the Tuilleries to-day to recall the ornate
splendors of the Second Empire, when the Empress Eugenie held her
court there, and gave garden parties under the oaks and the chestnuts.
There is a vast chasm between the pomp of courts and huts furnished
for three hundred francs for the miserable victims of the war; but
that chasm, to be sure, was bridged by the Commune and this war has
shown those that have visited the Military Zone that a palace makes a
no more picturesque ruin than a village.

VI

A more curious contrast was a concert given one afternoon in the
Tuilleries Gardens for the purpose of raising money for one of the war
relief organizations. Madame Paul Dupuy asked me if I would help her
take two blind soldiers to listen to it. We drove first out to Reuilly
to the Quinze Vingts, a large establishment where the Government has
established hundreds of their war blind (who are being taught a score
of new trades), and took the two young fellows who were passed out to
us. The youngest was twenty-one, a flat-faced peasant boy, whose eyes
had been destroyed by the explosion of a pistol close to his face. The
older man, who may have been twenty-six, had a fine, thin, dark face
and an expression of fixed melancholy. He had lost his sight from
shock. Both used canes and when we left the car at the entrance to the
Tuilleries we were obliged to guide them.

The garden was a strange assortment of fashionable women, many of them
bearing the highest titles in France, and poilus in their faded
uniforms, nearly all maimed--reformes, mutiles! The younger of our
charges laughed uproariously, with the other boys, at the comic song,
but my melancholy charge never smiled, and later when, under the
thawing influence of tea, he told us his story, I was not surprised.

He had been th