chemist, you know, -I 've worked out a powder that kills flies."

Watts looked up from his pillow. His face was weary.

"It 's sweet, you know, and attracts them," went on the boy; "then the least sniff of it finishes them. They trail away, and die in a few minutes. You can clear a room in half an hour. Then all you have to do is to sweep up. See here," he said, "I 'll show you. Sister!" he called. The nurse hurried to his side.

"Sister, you were kind enough to save my kit. May I have it a moment?"

He took out a tin flask, and squeezed it; a brown powder puffed through the pinpoint holes at the mouth. It settled in a dust on the white coverlet.

"Please be very quiet," he said. He settled back as if for sleep, but his halfshut eyes were watchful. A couple of minutes passed, then a fly circled his head, and made for the spot on the spread. It nosed its way in, crawled heavily a few inches up the coverlet, and turned its legs up. Two more came, sniffed, and died. "You see," he said.

NEXT day the head of the Coxyde Poste motored over to Furnes for a call on his wounded helper.

"Where does all that chatter come from?" he asked.

Sister Teresa smiled.

"It 's your silent friend," she said; "he is the noisiest old thing in the ward." "Talking to himself?" inquired the doc

tor.

"Have a look for yourself," urged the

nurse.

They stepped into the ward, and down the stone floor till they came to the supplytable. Here they pretended to busy themselves with lint.

"Most interesting," Watts was saying. "That is a new idea to me. Here they 've been telling me for a year that there's no way but the slow push, trench after trench-"

"Let me say to you-" interrupted the Saxon lad.

"You will pardon me if I finish what I am saying," went on Watts in full tidal flow. "What was it I was saying? Oh, yes, I remember. That slow hard push is not the only way, after all. You tell me-"

"That 's the way it is all day long," explained the sister-"chatter, chatter, chatter. They are telling each other all they know. You would think they would get fed up; but as fast as one of them says something, that seems to be a new idea to the other. Mr. Watts acts like a man who has been starved."

Watts caught sight of his friend.

"We 've killed all the flies," he shouted to the doctor.

to England in the autumn of 1914 as a "little token" of his country's fellowship was a medallion head in bronze of France herself. The sculptor, in a time of worried peace which disguised the spirit of his country, saw clearly through to the essential character of his people, and faithfully recorded what he saw. We can read the genius and history of France in the face which here confronts us, including a history which, when Rodin fashioned it, was yet unwritten. He shows us the candid intellect of France looking straight at life without illusion and without fear, but keeping, along with her knowledge, a perpetual youth. He has expressed in strange harmony the contradictory qualities of his race-qualities which have pro

France is the most worldly and the most quixotic of nations. How, we ask, can a people which knows so much; which is so logical, critical, and skeptical; which has cruelly uprooted everything that does not square with right reason; which prudently enthrones the golden mean in conduct and speculation; which satirizes all vague excess and desires to be quite rational even in its enthusiasm-how can this nation be still so obviously young and passionate, can still at bottom retain an inexhaustible idealism? How can a spirit fashioned for pleasure be so clearly urged by a restless intellectual prompting and so resolute a will to think and lead? How can disillusion lurk where youth persists, and how can innocence be so wary? Rodin has asked and answered these questions as only an artist can. He presents the enigma, and leaves it for the halting psychologists to explain. He shows us the intellect of France lying level upon her brow and looking out of her wide eyes; he shows us centuries of experience in her faintly hollowed cheek, an unworn capacity for pleasure in her full, firm lips, and in the lifted chin an alertness and a resolution, an eagerness to meet destiny half-way and to be spared no discovery or discipline which the future may contain. Above all, the faith of the artist is triumphantly declared that France has kept unspoiled her vernal capacity te be passionately moved in behalf of the simple virtues.

Rodin, moreover, has expressed what some of us have long suspected of his country-a paradox obscured by accidental qualities which, as we shall see, the war has stripped away. When we have noted and analyzed our impressions of Rodin's France in detail, and can surrender ourselves to the general mood of the whole, we are made aware that the prevailing note is a note of discipline and austerity, of patience to endure, of an ascetic devotion capable of a firm frugality. Rodin interpreted the spirit of France at a time when few could have so bravely divined it. He looked beneath the social politics and pleasures of Paris, where the arriviste seemed to be a typical product of an age without a soul, and he showed us a France which seemed more fitted to be the inheritor of Sparta than of Sybaris.

Many writers have discovered and proclaimed "the new France" during the last twelve months, but it may perhaps be permitted an English critic who has always loved and insisted upon the austerity and discipline of France in her art and literature to record exactly how France to-day in her national life reveals more clearly than ever before the essential qualities of the French character, more especially those qualities wherein the French character presents a deep, instructive contrast with the British. The comparison, though healthy and instructive, is not necessarily

odious. English virtue is not less than the virtue of France, but it is different; and in this time of war it is for the English rather to discover what is admirable in their friends than in themselves. We can none the less hold fast to the things which make England unlike her neighbor, though we praise and delight in exactly those things which make us proud to-day of our neighbor's partnership.

The contrast between France and England is found at once in Paris. We do not need to penetrate into the region of safe-conducts to discover that the spirit of France is quite distinct from the spirit of England. The impressions of a visitor newly come from London to Paris are, indeed, so powerful and diverse that some reflection is necessary before the root of the divergence between the two countries can be disinterred from a general mass of dissimilarity.

That Paris herself should start a train of observation which carries us straight into the battle-line is one of the happiest results of the war. Normally Paris-the Paris which insistently offers herself to the casual passenger-is less a typical city of France than London is a typical city of Great Britain. But Paris stands to-day as a fair representative of the nation. People will look in vain for cosmopolitan ParisParis which belonged equally to all who carried the necessary purse. Paris has ceased to play the part of a general entertainer. She now expresses the brain and heart of a people. Paris would stand today high among Ruskin's "cities of the soul." Spirituel Paris has always been and will always remain; but spiritual she has only now become in her testing time. Hitherto the world has had to divine Paris under an international disguise. Not many strangers have hitherto come at the French kernel of Paris. Paris has been superficially delivered up to things which are common to the dullest, as well as to the most brilliant, cities of the world. But that is changed now, and every lover of France rejoices to see in Paris the fundamental virtues of France. Visitors looked for Paris in the Moulin Rouge, the Folies Bergères, the boulevards, and the Latin extremity of the Luxembourg. It was a Paris of foreign colonists, of international interests and professions. America was there, and Great Britain; almost every country but France. But Paris now is the heart of France, the natural gate whereby one enters into her battle-fields. With out leaving the streets of Paris we can learn to understand the new spirit in France-the union sacrée which has made of M. Barrés an eloquent friend of the republic; the marvelous patience of the poilu; the phlegmatic and incessant energy of the work-people and peasants; the curiously impersonal way in which every Frenchman regards his own particular case; the assurance with which every one faces the need to endure to the end a burden the full weight of which has been measured. In Paris to-day we are haunted at every turn by Rodin's clear and masterful expression of the soul of his country. We find that expression upon the faces of her people and in the aspect of her streets and squares.

It is not easy to say how one arrives at the prevailing mood of a big city. Certainly it is not from the merely formal evidence. It is easily said that the illumination of Paris is something a little brighter than the illumination of London according to the latest order; that Paris sleeps at eleven o'clock; that Montmartre, which was never really a part of Paris, has mercifully ceased to exist; that the boulevards have been cleared of their international rout; that no one can enter, remain in, or leave Paris without consulting the commissioner of police; that the only recreations which show any signs of vitality are the "actualités" of the Cinema and the Comédie Française; that most of the shops are closed; that the public services are worked by women who do not consider it necessary to go into uniform; that the streets are checkered at all hours of the day with the black of the bereaved and the faded azure of the wounded. But when all these things are said and have been indefinitely expanded, Paris remains unexpressed.

What is it that makes the atmosphere of Paris, the capital of an invaded country, where neither business nor pleasure nor daily bread is as usual, a place essentially more tranquil and smiling than London? Why do we feel a curious relief as, newly arrived from England, we drive into its streets from St. Lazare?

This first impression in Paris of a general atmosphere more light and free than the atmosphere of London is eventually found to be due chiefly to the complete contrast in political, military, and industrial discipline between the two countries. In France the war is a public service; in England it is a private adventure. In France every man is under orders. He is troubled with no problems of conduct. He is under no responsibility to choose. He is not pulled between his private duty to a family and his public duty to the state. The war in France is not, as in England, the gallant, personal affair of picked adventurers. It is a national enterprise, a sober, practical business in which every man and woman has been given a fixed and settled position. One missed in Paris the unrest, the hesitation, the puzzlement the thousand private agonies of will and temper which have recently made of London a city of moral conflict. In place of a multitude of personal and private problems, of individual decisions taken after a long and painful balancing of alternatives, of unsolicited explanations why this man has not gone into the war and why this other man has felt bound to do so, of urgent public speeches and fierce controversy in the press and in the clubs and in households all over the country, of propaganda which in vain has sought to be free of doctrinal animusin place of all the consequences that needs must ensue from running a national enterprise upon individualist and voluntary lines we find everywhere in Paris the evidence of a general and settled will. No man in Paris is craven or a hero. He is simply a patriot under orders; and his heroism, when it comes, belongs to France. The country is not distracted between the men who have said yes and the men who have said no. There is in Paris a complete absence of misgiving or of emotional celebration. The soldiers of France are not regarded as being about any heroic personal adventure. They have obeyed a decree of the state. The city has not had to pass through those periods of excitement, questioning, and introspection which for months past have tormented London, abasing the self-respect of hundreds of men and women who have not been equal to the awful responsibility-a responsibility which only the broad shoulders of the state can adequately bear-of deciding whether the war has or has not a personal call for them.

war.

Here undoubtedly is an explanation in part of the indescribable serenity of Paris. Paris has come squarely to terms with the There is no dispute or heart-searching anywhere among the people. Virtually every man and woman has an appointed task, and no one wonders whether it is exactly the right one. It has been appointed as an essential thing, and must be looked to. There are no problems in Paris, no political rumor or social unrest. We escape from an atmosphere of change and interrogation into an atmosphere of assurance and discipline; and the change is an immediate relief to a traveler from London, where every third man is standing at this or that parting of the ways, where the air is thick with discussion, and where the whole nation is adapting itself to new necessities and new ideas.

This, the first and most superficial contrast of all between France and England in the last few months, was itself the result of a deeper national divergence. England is as characteristically a country of the amateur and the opportunist, the country of lonely furrows and wilful adventure, as France is the country of ordered and collected effort, the country of activities sociable and regular. The superficial license of French politics has never affected the deep, methodical life of the French people. There has never been any real frivolity or inconsequence in the vivacity of French thought. The enthusiasms of France have always been as ra

tional as her intensive culture. France is intolerant of personal license and peculiarity, of anything oddly individual, of all idiosyncrasy and excess. A man who offends the general taste in dress or manner can always walk quite unmolested in London. In Paris he will be at once remarked, and will be fortunate if he avoids an open quarrel. The instinct for thinking and working together in France is as great as the instinct in England for each man to go his individual way. It is therefore perfectly natural that, at a time which brings out the essential qualities of race, France should assume that every member of the nation is upon an equality of honor and effort, whereas in England men are suffered to divide themselves to the right or left as personal inclination drives them.

The next point in which we are sensible of a difference in atmosphere between London and Paris is partly due to the essential divergence already emphasized between a nation of adventurers and a nation disciplined to a common task. The fact that every Frenchman is part of the state machine means that every Frenchman has what we may describe as a professional interest in the war. He is more in touch with the true position of affairs and knows better how to take long and level views. The British public has from the first been at the mercy of its press and of self-elected strategists who irresponsibly discuss and prophesy concerning the war, who raise or depress the public temper without any real authority or knowledge, who talk upon the merest hint of "victories," and are surprised when they suddenly become aware that things are not going altogether successfully. There is in Paris a much more stable public opinion as to the war. There is none of the eagerness to be fed with scraps of gossip, none of the swift alternations of extravagant hope and unwarranted depression, which in London is continuous and exhausting. Paris has taken full measure of the task in hand, is resolute to finish it, and has already come to terms with the worst. There is a high confidence in Paris that