in Bordeaux; and now it turns out to mean, in addition to being a young
University of Virginia man, thoroughly acquainted with the people he has
to deal with, living in a town where the towers of Francis I's castle
still stand, rowing on a charming old river in the summer, and in these
days hearing a charming old French gentleman, vice-consul, tell how he
fought against the Prussians in '70. Cognac is a real place, it
appears--an old town of twenty thousand people or so, and it is really
where cognac comes from, all other brandies being, of course, as one
will learn here, mere upstart eaux-de-vie. We went through some of the
cellars to-day, as venerable and vast as the claret cellars in Bordeaux,
although not quite as interesting, perhaps, because not so "alive." For
wine is a living thing, as the man said in Bordeaux, and it must be
ignobly boiled and destroyed before turning into a distilled spirit. To
some this pale spiritual essence may possess a finer poetry--the cellars
are more fragrant, at any rate.

All the young men had gone to the front--their wages continued as usual
--and the work was carried on by women and old servitors, scarcely one
of the latter under seventy. They were pointed out as examples of the
beneficent effect of the true cognac--these old boys who had inhaled the
slightly pungent fragrance of the cellars and bottling-rooms all their
lives. You get this perfume all over Cognac. It comes wandering down
old alleyways, out from under dark arches, people live literally in a
fine mist of it. The very stones are turned black by the faint fumes.

There must be scores of towns south of Paris which look more or less
like this--the young men gone or drilling in the neighborhood, the
schools turned into hospitals, the little old provincial hotels
sheltering families fled from Paris. There are several such at our
hotel, nice, comfortable people--you might think you were in some