official looking building. It was not official, we learned--just
a chateau. A driveway ran under it. That got us. For when a road
leads into a house in America, it means a jail, or a courthouse,
or a hotel, or a steel magnate's home or a department store. But
when we scooted under the house we came into a wide white courtyard,
gravel paved. We left the machine and went from the courtyard into
a garden--the loveliest old walled garden imaginable. At the corners
of the garden were fine old trees--tall, spike-shaped evergreens
of some variety, and in the midst of it was a weeping yew tree and
a fountain. Around the walls were shrubs and splashed about the
walks and near the fountain were gorgeous dabs of colour, phlox
and asters, and dahlias and hollyhocks and flowers of various gay
sorts. And back of the garden, down a shaded path, lay the hospital--a
new modern barracks of a hospital, in a field sheltered from the
street by all that grandeur and all that beauty. The hospital was
made of rough, brown stained boards; it was one story high, built
architecturally like a tannery, and camouflaged as to the roof to
represent "green fields and running brooks." Board floors and board
partitions under the roof were covered as well as they could be;
and stoves furnished the heat. The beds--acres and acres of iron
beds--were assembled in the great wards and stretched far down the
long rooms like white ranks of skeletoned ghosts. The place was
American--new, excruciatingly clean, and was run like a factory. We
were proud of it, and of the business-like young medical students
who as orderlies and bookkeepers and helpers went about in their
brand new uniforms--young crown princes of democracy, twice as
handsome and three times as dignified as they would have been if
they had royal blood. Henry called them the heirs apparent "of all
the ages" and enjoyed them greatly. They certainly gave the place
a tone, converting a sprawling ugly pile of brown boards into a