well enough. There is n't a boy of eight in our commune who cannot tell you how it all came about, and who is not just now full of stories of 1870, which he has heard from grandma and grandpa; for, as is natural, every one talks of 1870 now. I have lived among these people, loved them, and believed in them, even when their politics annoyed me; but I confess that they have given me a surprise.

August 17, 1914.

For days now the women and children have been climbing the hill at six in the morning, with big hats on their heads, deep baskets on their backs, low stools in their hands. There is a big field of black-currant bushes beside my garden to the south. All day, in the heat, they sit under the bushes, picking away. At sundown, they carry their heavy baskets to the weighingmachine by the roadside at the foot of the hill, and stand in line to be weighed in and paid by the English buyers for Crosse and Blackwell, Beach, and such houses, who have, I suppose, some special means of transportation.

That is, however, the regular work for the women and children. Getting in the grain is not. Yet if you could see them take hold of it, you would love them. The old men do a double amount. Amélie's husband is over seventy. His own work in his fields and orchard would seem too much for him. Yet he and Amélie and the donkey are in the fields by three o'clock every morning, and by nine o'clock, he is marching down the hill, with his rake and hoe on his shoulder, to help his neighbors.

I have just heard that there are two trains a day on which civilians can go up to Paris, if there are places left after the army is accommodated. There is no guaranty that I can get back the same day. Still, I am going to risk it.

I am afraid to be any longer without money, though goodness knows what I can do with it. Besides, I find that all my friends are flying, and I feel as if I should like to say good-bye. I don't know why, but I feel like indulging the impulse.

August 24, 1914.

Nothing going on here except the passing now and then of a long line of Paris street busses on the way to the front. They are all mobilized and going as heroically to the front as if they were human, and going to get smashed up just the same. It does give me a queer sensation to see them climbing this hill. The little Montmartre-St. Pierre bus, that climbs the hill to the funicular in front of Sacré Cœur, came up bravely. It was built to climb a hill. But the Bastille-Madeleine and the Ternes-Filles de Calvaire and the St. Sulpice-Villette just groaned and panted, and had to have their traction changed every few steps. I thought they would never get up, but they did. Another day it was the automobile delivery wagons of the Louvre, the Bon Marché, the Printemps, PetitSt. Thomas, La Belle Jardinière, Potin, - all the automobiles with which you are so familiar in the streets of Paris. Of course, these are much lighter, and came up bravely. As a rule, they are all loaded. It is as easy to take men and material to the front that way as by railroad, since the cars must go. Only once have I seen any attempt at pleasantry on these occasions. One procession went out the other day with all sorts of funny inscriptions, some not at all pretty, many blackguarding the Kaiser, and, of course, one with the inevitable, 'À Berlin,' the first battlecry of 1870. This time there has been very little of that. I confess it gave me a kind of shiver to see 'À Berlin pour notre plaisir' all over the bus.

September 3, 1914. Since the Germans crossed the frontier, our news of the war has been meagre. We got the calm, constant reiteration, 'Left wing, held by the English, forced to retreat a little.' All the same, the general impression was that, in spite of that, 'all was well.'

It was not until Tuesday afternoon -day before yesterday — that I got my first hint of the truth. That afternoon, while I was standing on the platform, I heard a drum beat in the street and sent Amélie out to see what was going on. She came back at once to say that it was the garde champêtre calling on the inhabitants to carry all their guns, revolvers, and so forth, to the mairie before sundown. That meant the disarming of our département, and it flashed through my mind that the Germans must be nearer than the official announcements had told us.

While I stood reflecting a moment, - it looked serious, I saw approaching from the west side of the track a procession of wagons. Amélie ran down the track to the crossing to see what it meant, and came back at once to tell me that they were evacuating the towns to the north of us.

I handed the basket of fruit I was holding into a coach of the train just pulling into the station, and threw my last package of cigarettes after it; and, without a word, Amélie and I went into the street, untied the donkey, climbed into the wagon, and started for home.

By the time we got to the road which leads east to Montry, whence there is a road over the hill to the south, it was full of the flying crowd. It was a sad sight. The procession led in both directions as far as we could see. There were huge wagons of grain, herds of cattle, flocks of sheep; wagons full of household effects, with often as many as twenty people sitting aloft; carriages; automobiles with the occupants crowd

ed in among bundles done up in sheets; women pushing overloaded handcarts; women pushing baby-carriages; dogs and cats and goats; and every sort of a vehicle you ever saw, drawn by every sort of beast that can draw, from dogs to oxen, from boys to donkeys. Here and there there was a man on horseback, riding along the line, trying to keep it moving in order and to encourage the weary. Every one was calm and silent. There was no talking, no complaining.

The whole road was blocked, however, and, even if our donkey had desired to pass,-which she did not,— we could not. We simply fell into the procession, as soon as we found a place. Amélie and I did not say a word to one another until we reached the road that turns off to the Château de Condé; but I did speak to a man on horseback, who proved to be the intendant of one of the châteaux at Daumartin, and to another who was the mayor. I simply asked from where these people had come, and was told they were evacuating Daumartin and all the towns on the plain between there and Meaux, which meant that all the villages visible from my garden were being evacuated by order of the military powers.

One of the most disquieting things about this was to see the effect of the procession as it passed along the road. All the way from Esbly to Montry people began to pack at once, and the speed with which they fell into the procession was disconcerting.

When we finally escaped from the crowd into the poplar-shaded avenue which leads to the Château de Condé, I turned to look at Amélie for the first time. I had had time to get a good hold of myself.

'Well, Amélie?' I said.

'Oh, madame,' she replied, 'I shall stay.'

'And so shall I,' I answered; but I

added, 'I think I must make an effort to get to Paris to-morrow, and I think you had better come with me. I shall not go, of course, unless I am sure of being able to get back. We may as well face the truth: if this means that Paris is in danger, or if it means that we may in our turn be forced to move on, I must get some money so as to be ready.'

'Very well, madame,' she replied, as cheerfully as if the rumble of the procession behind were not still in our ears. The next morning-that was yesterday, September 2—I woke just before daylight. There was a continual rumble in the air. At first I thought it was the passing of more refugees on the road. I threw open my blinds, and then realized that the noise was in the other direction, from the route nationale. I listened. I said to myself, ‘If that is not artillery then I never heard any.'

Sure enough, when Amélie came to get breakfast, she announced that the English were at the Demi-Lune. The infantry was camped there, and the artillery had descended to Couilly and was mounting the hill on the other side of the Morin, - between us and Paris.

I said a sort of 'Hm,' and told her to ask Père to harness at once. As we had no idea of the hours of the trains, or even if there were any, it was best to get to Esbly as early as possible. It was nine o'clock when we arrived, to find that there should be a train at halfpast. The station was full. I hunted up the chef de gare, and asked him if I could be sure of being able to return if I went up to Paris.

He looked at me in perfect amaze

ment.

'You want to come back?' he asked. 'Sure,' I replied.

'You can, if you take a train about four. That may be the last.'

I very nearly said, 'Jiminy-cricket!' The train ran into the station on time, but you never saw such a sight.

It was packed as the Brookline street cars used to be on the days of a baseball game. Men were absolutely hanging on the roof; women were packed on the steps that led up to the imperials to the third-class coaches. It was a perilous-looking sight. I opened a dozen coaches - all packed, standing room as well as seats, which is ordinarily against the law. I was about to give it up when a man said to me, 'Madame, there are some coaches at the rear that look as if they were empty.'

I made a dash down the long platform, yanked open a door, and was about to ask if I might get in, when I saw that the coach was full of wounded soldiers in khaki, lying about on the floor as well as the seats. I was so shocked that if the station-master, who had run after me, had not caught me I should have fallen backward.

'Sh! madame,' he whispered, 'I'll find you a place.' And in another moment I found myself, with Amélie, in a compartment where there were already eight women, a young man, two children, and heaps of hand-luggage, -bundles in sheets, twine bags just bulging, paper parcels, and valises. Almost as soon as we were in, the train pulled slowly out of the station.

I learned from the women that Meaux was being evacuated. No one was remaining but the soldiers in the barracks and the Archbishop. They had been ordered out by the army the night before, and the railroad was taking them free. They were escaping with what they could carry in bundles, as they could take no luggage. Their calm was remarkable, not a complaint from any one. They were of all classes, but the barriers were down.

The young man had come from farther up the line, a newspaper chap, who had given me his seat and was sitting on a bundle. I asked him if he knew where the Germans were, and he

replied that on this wing they were at Compiègne, that the centre was advancing on Coulommier, but he did not know where the Crown Prince's division was.

I was glad I had made the effort to get to town, for this began to look as if they might succeed in arriving before the circle of steel that surrounds Paris, and God knows what good that seventy-five miles of fortifications will be against the long-range cannon that battered down Liège. I had only one wish, -to get back to my hut on the hill; I did not seem to want anything else.

Just before the train ran into Lagny our first stop—I was surprised to see British soldiers washing their horses in the river; so I was not surprised to find the station full of men in khaki. They were sleeping on benches along the wall, and standing about in groups. As to many of the French on the train this was their first sight of the men in khaki, and as there were Scotch there in their kilts, there was a good deal of excitement.

The train made a long stop in the effort to put more people into the already overcrowded coaches. I leaned forward, wishing to get some news, and the funny thing was that I could not think how to speak to those boys in English. You may think that an affectation. It was n't. Finally I desperately sang out, 'Hallo, boys!'

You should have seen them dash for the window. I suppose that their native tongue sounded good to them so far from home.

'Where did you come from?' I asked. 'From up yonder - a place called La Fère,' one of them replied.

'What regiment?' I asked. 'Any one else here speak English?' he questioned, running his eyes along the faces thrust out of the windows.

I told him no one did.

'Well,' he said, 'we are all that is left of the North Irish Horse and a regiment of Scotch Borderers.'

'What are you doing here?'

'Retreating and waiting for orders. How far are we from Paris?'

I told him about seventeen miles. He sighed and said that he thought they were nearer, and, as the train started, I had the idea in the back of my head that these boys actually expected to retreat inside the fortifications. La! la!

Instead of the half hour the train usually takes to get up from here to Paris, we were two hours.

I found Paris much more normal than I had expected it to be; nevertheless, it was still quite unlike itself: every one perfectly calm and no one with the slightest suspicion that the battle-line was so near, - hardly more than ten miles beyond the outer forts. I transacted my business quickly-saw only one person, and caught the four o'clock train back. We were almost the only passengers.

Just after we left Esbly, I saw an English officer standing in his stirrups and signaling across a field, where I discovered a detachment of English artillery going toward the hill. A little farther along the road, we met a couple of English officers, pipes in their mouths and sticks in their hands, strolling along as quietly and smilingly as if there were no such thing as war. The sight of them and their cannon made me feel a bit serious. I thought to myself, 'If the Germans are not expected here well, it looks like it.'

We finished the journey in silence, and I was so tired when I got home that I fell into bed and drank only a glass of milk that Amélie insisted on pouring down my throat.

I

FROM the police point of view there may be no such thing as a typical city. The maintenance of order and the enforcement of police regulations present questions which can be answered only after consideration has been given to a large variety of factors, many of them local and individual. Geographical position, the ethnic character of the population, economic conditions, and the political ideas and ideals of the community, must all be borne in mind in the development of rules and theories of social control. In this, of course, the problem of the police does not differ from other institutional questions. The best form of government for a city is never some abstract, platonic conceit, but, like the best suit of clothes for an individual, it is the one that fits. A community which, for any reason, elects incompetent and untrustworthy officials and is indifferent to the kind of government it gets, is quite certain to get bad government, however admirably contrived the mere machinery of administration may be. On the other hand, inconvenient and cumbersome machinery, in the hands of capable and upright men, often produces excellent results, especially when sustained by an alert and intelligent public opinion. The matter was all stated by whatever Englishman it was who said, 'If you elect a rogue to represent you in Parliament, he does represent you!'

To the public mind the police problem in any city means the problem of

selecting and managing a force of men organized for the purpose of detecting criminals and repressing disorder. To those who have had the responsibility of being municipal executives it is rather the problem of devising ways to attract an informed public opinion to new phases of old social questions, or to anticipate prejudice by disseminating real knowledge as to new evils requiring restraint in the interest of the common good. With all his solid look, the policeman carrying out a regulation which is disapproved by the community conscience is either a tyrant or a failure. Emerson was no doubt right in his picture of the child acquiring his first notion of society from the patrolman, who seems always to have been and destined always to be; but we are not children long, and the fixed and eternal institutional world into which we are born crumbles with our first contact with a yielding fact. After that we are in the secret: laws are what men will. Bad laws are the willing of bad men; and forgotten words in statute books which no man now wills are not laws, with never so many policemen back of them. Of course this does not mean personal nullification, either in theory or in practice. All but the least restrained of us are willing to give the benefit of the doubt to the claimant, and to abate mere personal or group opinion in deference to even doubtfully authenticated public opinion; but after a while even the most law-abiding and patient find that the thing claimed to be the will of the community is no