There is a possibility of our going to Brussels. Oh, the joy of it! That may find me the means, through the American Ambassador, of getting back to my beloved France.

The youngest gardener, the little one, Charles, who is only eighteen years old, has left for "the front." Not with his regiment, for he hasn't one (this year was to have been his class), but as a private individual who could not stay at home when his country needed him. His old mother, with a little catch in her throat, sent him off proudly, her baby, her petit Charles, to serve with his four brothers, already gone.

But how can he get away with the eye of the arrogant usurper on every corner and road?

A Belgian soldier will play his rÔle after his own interpretation. Instead of going off in his best smock and a tiny bundle on a stick, le petit Charles bade us a smiling au revoir in his old blue apron and torn hat. He will wander aimlessly over the hills which he knows so well and, unsuspected, will creep through the friendly hedges into the very arms of hospitable Holland and then, "All's well."

Trains were passing all day loaded with provisions, as well as soldiers and sailors who were sticking on like caterpillars all over the roofs, the sides, the steps and almost the wheels. I saw two of them dancing the tango on the top of one carriage. Then came car after car of prairie wagons, we call them, with voluminous, white, canvas hoods, loaded with provisions; after these, countless, giant cannon decorated with branches, flowers and flags, mounted on open trucks without sides. All this procession was a weird phenomenon gliding by in the sky like a mirage, for the road-bed at the rear of the chÂteau is very high and is hidden by intervening shrubs and bushes so that the wheels of the cars are quite concealed. It reminded me of those Amazon warriors in "Die WalkÜre" who slid up to Heaven so smoothly on their wooden horses at the OpÉra in Paris.

Dropping from the poetical plane to common cause and effect, the whole gave the impression of being well lubricated—like the wheels of Destiny which turn steadily on with few jerks or hitches.