conferences.

"Ah!" she said, considerably reassured apparently, "Keepling!" But then
she may have come in late.

Thursday.

The war has been hard on the main business of the neighborhood, of
course--Germany was the heaviest buyer of Bordeaux wine, Russia next,
and not as much as usual is going to England. The vintage this year,
like that of 70, is said to be good, however, and, though the young men
have gone, and the wine-making was not as gay as usual, there were
enough old men and women left to do the work. I visited one of the
older wine houses--nearly two centuries old--and tramped through cellars
which burrow on two levels under a whole city block. There were some
two million bottles down there in the dark and dust.

There is something patriarchal and princely about such a house, almost
unknown in our businesses at home--from the portraits of the founders,
from the caskmakers, at lunch-time, broiling their own fish over a huge
fireplace and drawing wine from the common cask as they have done for
generations; the stencils in the shipping-room--"Baltimore," "Bogota,"
"Buenos Aires," "Chicago," "Calcutta," "Christiania," "Caracas"--from
things like these to the personality and point of view of the men who
have the business in charge.

"Now, wine," began the charming gentleman who showed us round, "is a
living thing." And though you could see that he had showed many people
about in his day--and was not unaware of what might interest them--that
he was, in short, an advertiser of the most accomplished kind, yet one