gents--pleasant dreams!"

Pleasant dreams--indeed!

But in the morning we arose refreshed and hurried along a misty
plain, forty miles or so from the American troops. Always in the
background were great bushy trees, and lush green grass, and the
thing was composed. How the French manage to compose their landscape
is too much for me. But at any of a thousand points the scene might
have been photographed for a Corot, by getting a few good-looking
girls in nighties to dance on the grass of the middle distance!
American landscape has to be picked apart to have its picture taken;
a tree selected here, a hill there, a brook yonder, and if ladies
in nighties are needed, they are brought from afar! They are not
indigenous to the soil. But one feels that in France they might
come sidling out from behind any willow clump with their toes rouged
ready for the dance!

The road that morning seemed traversing a great picture gallery,
unwinding into life as from a dream within a dream! And then,
after two hours of joyous landscape, we waked and saw America! Now
America was not a vision; it was substantial, if not beautiful. As
we switched around a bend in the road we came upon America full-sized
and blood raw--a farmer boy--bronzed, milk-eyed, good-natured, with
the Middle West written all over him. He wore a service hat at a
forward pitch over his eyes; in his hands, conched to tremulo the
sound, he held an harmonica; his eyes were aslit in the ecstasy of
his own music; from the crook of his arm dangled a bridle, and he
sat cross-legged high up on the quarter deck of a great four-story,
full-rigged Missouri mule. He didn't salute us but called "Hi" as