rows of bunks, mess-tables, sizzling sauce-pans over kitchen-fires.
Everywhere were endless ingenuities in the way of camp-furniture and
household decoration. Farther down the road a path between
fir-boughs led to a hidden hospital, a marvel of underground
compactness. While we chatted with the surgeon a soldier came in
from the trenches: an elderly, bearded man, with a good average
civilian face--the kind that one runs against by hundreds in any
French crowd. He had a scalp-wound which had just been dressed, and
was very pale. The Colonel stopped to ask a few questions, and then,
turning to him, said: "Feeling rather better now?"

"Yes, sir."

"Good. In a day or two you'll be thinking about going back to the
trenches, eh?"

"_I'm going now, sir._" It was said quite simply, and received in
the same way. "Oh, all right," the Colonel merely rejoined; but he
laid his hand on the man's shoulder as we went out.

Our next visit was to a sod-thatched hut, "At the sign of the
Ambulant Artisans," where two or three soldiers were modelling and
chiselling all kinds of trinkets from the aluminum of enemy shells.
One of the ambulant artisans was just finishing a ring with
beautifully modelled fauns' heads, another offered me a
"Pickelhaube" small enough for Mustard-seed's wear, but complete in
every detail, and inlaid with the bronze eagle from an Imperial
pfennig. There are many such ringsmiths among the privates at the
front, and the severe, somewhat archaic design of their rings is a
proof of the sureness of French taste; but the two we visited