kindly to bed. Never was there a more strangely built little house! The
ceilings came down on our heads, the stairs were perpendicular. But
there was a stove in each room, and the beds though hard, and the floor
though bare, were scrupulously clean. In the early morning I woke up and
looked out. There had been a white frost, and the sun was just rising in
a clear sky. Its yellow light was shining on the whitewashed wall of the
next cottage, on which a large pear-tree was trained. All round were
frost-whitened plots of garden or meadow--_préaux_--with tall poplars in
the hedges cutting the morning sky. Suddenly, I heard a continuous
murmur in the room beneath me. It was the schoolmistress and her maid at
prayer. And presently the house door opened and shut. It was
Mademoiselle who had gone to early Mass. For the school was an _école
libre_, and the little lady who taught it was a devout Catholic. The
rich yet cold light, the frosty quiet of the village, the thin French
trees against the sky, the ritual murmur in the room below--it was like
a scene from a novel by René Bazin, and breathed the old, the
traditional France.

We were to start early and motor far, but there was time before we
started for a little talk with Mademoiselle. She was full of praise for
our English soldiers, some of whom were billeted in the village. "They
are very kind to our people, they often help the women, and they never
complain." (Has the British Tommy in these parts really forgotten how to
grouse?) "I had some of your men billeted here. I could only give them a
room without beds, just the bare boards. 'You will find it hard,' I
said. 'We will get a little straw,' said the sergeant. 'That will be all
right.' Our men would have grumbled." (But I think this was
Mademoiselle's _politesse_!) "And the children are devoted to your
soldiers. I have a dear little girl in the school, nine years old.
Sometimes from the window she sees a man in the street, a soldier who