HOTEL DES THERMES, SALSOMAGGIORE,
September 25th, 1915.

DEAR FRIEND,

I do not want to leave this lovely place, where for three weeks I have had such benefit, without sending you a few loving words.

I think so much of last year, of what these days were to you, how you lived them through with patient grace and wonderful fortitude, as your mind and heart followed your boy in Flanders. It is very impressive in the Bible where it says: "The thing that I feared has come upon me," and I remember a friend of mine in America, who in one year lost her husband and her son, saying to me with wonderful composure, but great tenderness: "I have nothing to fear now any more. When it rains, when it is cold, when there is danger on land or sea, my heart never will tremble again, because there is no one whose going out into the storm can fill me with anguish and unrest."

I am going from here to-day to Bologna, Ravenna, Rimini, and Florence. The cure has done me vast good. Although I am not entirely well, I feel like another person, and I should like to come here every year. Perhaps next year, dearest friend, you will come with me; for there is much about it that you would like and enjoy, and you can be perfectly comfortable.

It has interested me very much, as a foreigner and a student of life, to see what little there has been to see here of the real and "best" Roman society. Some of the smartest and most worldly of the Roman aristocracy are here at Salso. I have made one very good friend, however, in the Marchesa di Bourbone-Rangoni, who has a lovely property near Florence, on which she lives alone with her two children---a beautiful boy and a lovely little girl. She administers her own estate splendidly, has doubled her income since she became a farmer, and when she knits woollen things for the soldiers, she sits there knitting them from the wool of her own sheep. I call that very chic indeed; don't you? (I dare say she could give us, who need it so much, some wool.) She is a tall, graceful woman, very distinguished, with a great deal of genre and attraction. I like her immensely. I think she would be a good friend, and she certainly is a most agreeable one.

One of the most popular women in Rome, and one of the undoubted leaders of society, a woman whose word is quite sufficient to make you---and I am sure she is too generous to unmake anybody!---is the Marchesa di Rudini. Of course you know whom I mean. She is très grande dame, with a poise and charm. My few short entretiens with her have been delightful, and it has been a pleasure to exchange ideas with somebody.

I send you my best and dearest love, and will write you from Florence what I am doing there.

RIMINI, September 28th, 1915.

DEAR BESSIE,

We are in the Italian War Zone, and so far I have been able to circulate freely and without the slightest inconvenience, now that our passports are en règle from Bologna. It is hard to believe that all the formalities that make travel so difficult in France exist. Only three things make us know that Italy is at war: the grey clouds of soldiers drifting hither and thither through the tiny streets of these little towns, the fact that we are the only tourists anywhere, and the mediæval darkness of the streets at night. Think how charming it is to be in a country free of tourists, free of travellers, and---with the Italians---to have Italy all to oneself!

The beauty of Bologna at night, as we walked out late in the streets, hither and thither, under the arcades, was beyond compare. Think of the whole city---you can't say lighted, for it was not lighted, but faintly illumined by little lights flickering through turquoise and peacock blue shaded glass. Just picture it! Far down a dim arcade, one caught a little spark of azure; then there would be a little group of green lights. Every light in the strawberry and peach coloured city green or blue! This same wonderful phantasmagoria of lights is everywhere in this War Zone, menaced by enemies from the air and the sea.

When you think of the learned and richly interesting letters written about Italy, in Italy, and from Italy, it seems futile for an unimportant person to write any others; but I don't think you often find Italy written of by a frankly-confessed ignoramus---by some one who knows nothing at all about either geography or history. I don't know where anything is---neither its position on the map nor the juxtaposition of towns; and I don't know who any one was, and I never see sights; and yet, as I do see them, and as they unveil themselves to me, and as their beauty reveals itself to me, how I love it!

In the train, on the way to Ravenna, a most gracious and interesting woman, whom I took to be English, spoke to me, and was so good as to tell us where we could get luncheon and where we could stay in Ravenna and Rimini. Then we fell into conversation, and when, at the station, a tiny cart made of woven ropes drove up and took her bags and her husband's valises away, she herself ciceroned us to one of the churches. There, in the sunlight, with her for guide, we saw for the first time the Byzantine mosaics in all their beauty in the church of Sant' Appollinare Nuova. Later, she asked us to go and see her "house" before we left Ravenna.

The Contessa Rasponi was modest when she spoke of her "house." On foot I went and found it, and it rose up out of the cobblestones of the street---a fine, warm-hued palace---a big palace, with noble windows and a noble staircase, and noble rooms. There is nothing modern about it at all---not even the furniture; and Ravenna folds it around. Through the open windows one looks to the clustering roofs of the city. All the little town seems to come in at the windows.

"Here," said the Contessa, ''I like to live, because those I know and love have all lived together here for six hundred years."

(Do you know anybody you'd like to live six hundred years with? It's nice to find that some people are fond enough of their family and cousins to want to go right on.)

Contessa Rasponi is a perfect dear, and her husband most charming. Theirs was the first intermarriage between the old families Rasponi and Pasolini of Ravenna for six hundred years!

Silent Ravenna! And yet I heard several sounds there. (I will tell you what they were.) But the town is, taken altogether, the silentest inhabited place I ever knew. The name is beautiful, isn't it?---Ravenna. And Rimini, too. How those words seem to sing and call back again in their cadences the figures of the past! There are really no vehicles at all---just a primitive cab or two, easy-going victorias from the Middle Ages. You don't call donkeys and what they draw vehicles: they're just marvellously cunning, darling little things to go about with and in. And such heavenly little asini! And such old-world, unchanged in character and manufacture, little carts---just a few bits of rope tied together and wheels dangling somewhere, and then a donkey a couple of feet high. These are the vehicles. Otherwise Ravenna goes about---I am so sorry to say so---on bicycles. It's incongruous, isn't it? (Do you remember our bicycle rides at Divonne?) The bell of the bicycle was one of the sounds I heard in Silent Ravenna. Priests and tradespeople, factory girls in black and white polka-dotted dresses, gaily-coloured handkerchiefs tied over their heads, flit through the streets on the practical bicycle. But one doesn't mind them: they are quickly gone, and the shadows of the Middle Ages and the glow of the Byzantine settles around Ravenna.

Don't worry; I'm not going to give you any guide book description of Ravenna! I only know that I didn't know what mosaics could be, or what the word meant. You come across a little round tower like a cowshed or a pig-stye, and you wonder why they have left it and what the ages meant by it; and you open the door and go in, and then you know. Jewels on jewels multiplied; and such colours! Turquoise, peacock, golds and whites; swans and angels and doves, saints and patriarchs, on wall and ceiling, one after another. These vulgar, homely, ugly hovels blaze with beauty like some captured star. Think of such delicate, ephemeral beauty persisting for fifteen hundred years!

Ravenna! The very name chants to me as I say it and think about it.

And the little balcony of Francesca's house swings up in the blue air. I wonder they did not call her "Francesca da Ravenna." She seems so much more a part of it. Ravenna is such a lovely envelope for her memory. Dante, exiled here, drew his story under the charm of her native town. I am sure that here in Ravenna he made his immortal picture of her. Here she was a girl---dreaming, probably, over the sea-like marshes that isolated her town and that stretched between Ravenna and Rimini.

If I could only make you feel the picture of it! But I can't. I am surprised that so little is said or written about it. It is a marvel---a dream. I believe that I shall feel the silence of Ravenna all my life. You'll think this strange, when I enumerate the noises.

High up from an open window, as I pass along the tiny piazza, I hear the clicking of a typewriter! 'Way down one of the thread-like streets, close to the leaning tower, I saw a grey group of soldiers enthralled as they listened to a modern rag-time, ground out by just such a hand-organ as Italy brings to us across the sea. Then there was the bicycle bell. And then, at the Albergo San Marco, as modern as a good hotelkeeper who has tried his hand in Monte Carlo, London, and Paris can make it, I stayed awake until three in the morning with those of Ravenna who were silent by day and vocal by night. It is only fair to say, however, that there were two thousand soldiers quartered in the town, and the poor dears were going to the front. About six next morning, after two hours of sleep, I leaned out of the window and saw them marching away. . .

I have just had your cable from Yokohama---just one line of love. Thank you for spending the money to send it. It was welcome indeed. It found me here (in Florence) last night when I arrived, after a 200 kilometre motor drive over the Apennines. (October 1st now.)

My best love to Robert and you,

FLORENCE, October 1st, 1915.

MY DEAR BELLE,

I am sorry that you could not go with Bessie and Robert to Russia and Japan, but in this case I can quite understand your putting business before pleasure. I expect you'll make a fortune out of cotton and motors, and be a real Rothschild, speculating on the war. (As you have no Hebrew blood in your veins, you won't be cross at this.)

Speaking of a Scripps-Booth motor, and speaking of motors in general (for I believe you're interested in them), I wish you could have seen the car in which we dashed away from Ravenna. Up at Salso, a beautiful white car was offered me for frs. 600 (the rent of it, I mean), to take me from Salso to Florence. Well, of course, I didn't take it. I hugged the temptation, communed with it, went down and gazed at the car and came back and went by train!

But at Ravenna, the proprietor of the "Ritz-Carlton" (!) there, offered me for the sum of frs. 20 a motor going back anyway from Ravenna to Rimini. I fell to this, and when it heaved up before the door the following morning, it turned out to be a taxicab. In this object, only a vehicle at all because it had four wheels, we rolled out into the rain and away from Silent Ravenna.

In front of an old church some five or six miles out, I discovered that I had left my Briggs umbrella at the hotel. Just why I should have tried to retrieve this umbrella more than the hundreds I have lost in my life, I don't know; but the car went back whilst we "did" the church. That's about all the swift rolling that darned car did for the rest of the day!

Rimini, as the crow flies, or as the donkeys go, or as the bicycles glide, is about an hour's run from Ravenna. It's a mere nothing at all of a trip. How long do you think it took us in our car, in the rain? Just five hours! I don't know what blew up or blew out, not being an automobilist. A car can do almost anything and fool me; but this one did nothing. After we'd been crawling along for a few minutes, it stopped. We started out with two men "on the box," and then we lost one of them, who went off somewhere for something, and we sat there and enjoyed Italy for hours.

Little Angelo was five. He came and stood by the roadside, in his home-made trousers that reached below his knees, with his big, beautiful eyes fastened upon us, and his whole little figure the embodiment of childhood's dream. He was grace and charm personified.

There were other little children. One little bare-foot chap, under a sea-green cotton umbrella, carried a bottle of milk for which the crying baby waited an hour whilst the little messenger dreamed with Angelo by the wayside.

We extracted from Angelo that he was going to visit his grandmother---like Little Red Riding Hood---and finally, munching a bit of chocolate that we gave him, he trudged away in the rain toward "Grandmother's" house. Later, when the motor decided to get a move on it, we found him again, a little further along the road; and I wish with all my heart you could have seen that group. Little Angelo at home, with a furry horse-collar over his shoulder, carrying it somewhere; his uncle by his side---the most superb-looking young man you ever saw, a wound in his neck, and his arm just getting over paralysis, back from the front on sick leave: and standing in the courtyard, her arms white with the flour she had been making into bread, a white handkerchief around her lovely head, Angelo's aunt---a beauty, a raving beauty! And then all the picturesqueness of that country yard; the yellow corn spread upon the ground, the golden pumpkins on the roof; and coming down the road towards the farm, a brilliantly painted cart---a cart painted with bright flowers, crimson and blue---drawn by snow-white oxen with horns over a yard long each. You never in your life saw anything so picturesque and so enchanting.

Then we left them. Good-bye, little Angelo, for ever!

It wasn't long to me, any of that five hours; for, one after another, such lovely, lovely sights on every side to see, and through all the air such heavenly smells of broom and thyme and walnut; and high upon the umber hills, strongholds of robber barons of the Middle Ages; and it was enchanting to imagine that on this landscape Francesca of Ravenna dreamed from the stone window of her palazzo.

Whatever charm Rimini may have had, Francesca must have given to it, those centuries ago. There is little left of old Rimini now---a fragment of a city wall, its brown ruin facing the sea; a fragment of a gloomy, forbidding castle, to whose tragic walls Paolo brought her. There's little left of Rimini; and yet, even now, the thrill and the passion seems to linger still. The morbid marvel of her love story makes the very air quiver, makes the place aflame still. I shall never forget with what intense feeling I read Dante, three years ago, with Casabianca in my little study. I remembered it here at Rimini so clearly.

No one knows where Francesca's tomb is, or where her body lies. It is as though her sepulchre were in the wonderful verses that she inspired, in the hearts of all lovers. . .

The following morning, I fell to another motor temptation and came 150 miles from Rimini to Florence over the Apennines, over the very crests of the hills, past Vallombrosa, where the wind of late September blew away leaves like the ghosts of dreams; down here to Florence, to the very place where, five years ago, I came with Violet and Mother. .

I shall forget many things that I have seen, but I shall never forget the message of Silent Ravenna, or the emotion of Rimini, where the elusive memory of Francesca seemed to palpitate before me like a flame. I could seem to see her steal out of that old gate and slip down to the sea and meet her lover there---the boy forbidden to her by law and whom her heart and senses so adored. Poor little mediæval children, so like the lovers of to-day, so unchanged is love! Drifting shadows in Purgatory, blown thither by the wind of passion if you like, but nevertheless immortal and eternal through their love.

As I stood there in Rimini, that last night in the War Zone, the green-blue lamps below giving their pallid light and the heavens strewn thick with brilliant stars above, all the present faded away, and I assure you that I could see as clearly as though it were before me the red-brown palace of the Malatesta and the inner room with its scant and meagre furnishing, and I could see the young figures bending over the story of Launcelot and Guinevere.

When you receive this letter, you will be doing the California exposition on the shores of the Western sea, and all our Old World stories will seem to you like the dust off some old book that you shake away as you take the volume down.

With best love,

FLORENCE, October 1st, 1915.

MY DEAR MARY,

You say that you know it's useless to ask me to write you a line. Here are several!

How long ago it seems from to-day way back into that evening when I disgraced you at school! Do you remember how, in the middle of the piece I was playing before the Faculty and the assembled schoolmates, I smashed my hands down on the piano and jumped up and ran out of the room because I forgot, and was embarrassed? How ashamed you were of me, how distressed, and what mauvais quarts d'heure I gave you and my teachers at school! I never shall forget Miss Dana telling me, my last year in school, what a bitter disappointment I was to the faculty, and how they had hoped to make something out of me and had failed. Well, that's very long ago, isn't it, dear, dear old friend?

I am glad you liked "Big Tremaine." Thank you so much for telling me this. Nothing comes to me as a greater surprise than to discover that any one reads my books. I always know why I write them: there are two or three reasons for that. The first is because I can't help it; the second is because I need money; and---that's enough, isn't it? But the reason why any of them should be read I have never yet discovered. "Big Tremaine" has gone through three editions in England, and considering the war, that's a very good record.

Last night, I staggered into this little resting-place like a drunken sailor after a long voyage, intoxicated by the very air of an eight hours' motor trip from Rimini to Florence. These words perhaps mean nothing to you, my dear; but you can't imagine how divinely beautiful the reality was. It was very hard, in that mid-country, to believe that anything later than the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was going on beyond. As for fighting lines and modern warfare, one forgot it all. When you see in front of a pink stucco house a little old woman bending over her distaff and fingering the snowy yarn; when you see a farmyard, with the women spinning the flax; you forget about the twentieth century; and every now and then it is such a delicious and restful thing to do.

You say that you think of me as nursing the wounded soldiers. My dear, I am not doing that, nor have I been for a long time. I am taking a little excursion into the peaceful parts of the war countries, and it has been delightful in the extreme.

When I come to America next time, I shall surely see you. As you look back with me, my dear Mary, to the day when I first came to school, and chose you from all the teachers, as you sat there dignified and charming in your black and white check suit, and decided that you should be my mentor and my consoler---as you look back with me, my dear, and remember how I used to write verses in my arithmetic because I couldn't do the problems, and how I used to write stories on my music-book because I couldn't play the scales; when you remember that since then I have written twenty-five books---all bad, of course, but still it means a lot of exercise---you don't feel I've been such a disappointment to your part of the faculty, I know! And I am perfectly sure, dear Mary, that you were not at that faculty meeting when they brooded upon the demerits of the unsuccessful scholar.

I wasn't more than fifteen that first night when I came to Morristown, unexpectedly, to a school too full to take in a rank outsider. Still they admitted me, and I slept in the trunk-room; and you were kind to me, I have never forgotten it. Miss Dana, the principal, took me to her study and looked me over, and fastening her intelligent eyes on me, frightened me to death.

She often told me since, that she asked me casually, as she asked all the girls, "Is there any special branch of study you'd like to follow?" and that I answered jauntily, "Literature---I am going to be a novelist"---just as one might elect to be a baker or a candlestick maker.

Please write me and tell me what you are doing, and believe me, as ever,

FLORENCE, October 4th, 1915.

DEAR FRIEND,

I was so glad to have good news from the wanderers---Bessie and Robert. I understand they will not be back before Christmas. It seems horribly long to wait to see them. When they started, I feared that the Germans would be in Petrograd before the Le Roux; now I believe that they will never get there at all---I mean the Germans.

Our hearts are full of gratitude for the wonderful victories of France and England, and I hope that this good news will meet Robert and Bessie in Russia. I have a little letter from him, in which he says:

"Thank you for sending me the news that the Croix de Guerre has been placed on the grave of my beloved son. On his dying bed, he asked me: 'Do you think they will know that I died well and bravely? Father, do you think they will give me the Cross?' Then, I could not answer him. Now he knows. . ."

All these days must be so full of terrible souvenirs to Robert. It will take him many and many a journey, and many and many a new scene, to blot out from before his eyes the pictures of the hospital at Toul.

" . . . As I write in my little dug-out---only a hole scooped out of the earth like a rabbit hole---the enemy is continually sniping at us. They have trained men, good shots, who do nothing else but wait at loopholes in their trenches, waiting for us to show our heads above the parapet of our trench. They sometimes miss us, luckily.

It is marvellous how daring our fellows get. Although we are so near the Germans---only 150 yards---there are some partridges between us and an occasional rabbit; so during the day we try to shoot them, and we crawl out after dark to get them.

"Last week I was out early one morning looking for fruit, and I found a pear-tree. I was just standing up to get some when crack goes a bullet just over my head. I fell flat and, of course, had to crawl back to our trenches without any pears. I managed it next morning, and had stewed pears and blackberries for breakfast. What a mixture, eh? In the trenches, we are not allowed to make fires, because of the smoke showing; but 'Tommy' must have his tea, and he will always manage it. We get down in our little holes in the earth, and we utilise candle grease, vaseline, boot grease, rifle oil; all these things, with a little rag, will burn, and over this we cook and make our tea. 'Necessity is the mother of invention!'

"The greatest objection to the dug-outs is that they are swarming with vermin. Rats, mice, beetles, and a host of other objectionable things are always there, and we cannot get rid of them.

"A most interesting sight is to see an aeroplane being shelled; but of course you have seen that yourself. It must be exciting for the aeronaut, but they fly calmly on and seem to take no notice. I have only seen two brought down, falling like birds with broken wings.

"It tries our nerve here sometimes, under shell fire. Sometimes when one is walking along the trench, a shell strikes the parapet, almost burying us; but if no one is hurt it's usually treated as a joke. I believe I told you my chum and I were nearly caught one day on Hill 60, when a huge shell landed a few feet from us.

"If you should ever see me on leave, you must be prepared to see a very rough specimen of a soldier. Water is scarce here, and it often means going for days without a wash or a shave. I have enclosed a wee sketch of myself as I appeared last week, and honestly, it flatters me!

"It is surprising how cheerful and confident we are. Of course we want to get home, we are often hungry, we are dirty, and most uncomfortable, and we grumble; but we are going to win all the time.

"That German sniper keeps splashing the dirt over me as I write. I have been creeping round this morning trying to get a partridge, but no luck. I had decided to cook it 'en casserole,' but I have not got it yet.

"I must tell you a most amusing thing that happened last week. We were in a small village and our fellows are very French. Two of them wanted some milk, so went to an old lady and said: 'Dooley' (du lait)---'Compree dooley.' Well, the old lady did not 'compree.' After a lot of gesticulation and talking, the old lady brightened up and said: 'Ah, oui; je comprends!' Away she goes and comes back beaming and carrying six onions. To their credit be it said, they paid for the onions and came away. Another bought a tin of mushrooms, thinking he had apricots! It is amusing.

"If one of our fellows gets wounded, he is immediately classed as a 'lucky bounder.' Those who get home do certainly seem to have a good time of it, but I would like to get through it all safe.

"The Germans are now using great bombs which they try to drop in our trenches. The explosion is awful--fairly shakes the place. We call it the 'sausage.' 'Here comes another sausage!' is a common cry. 'Whiz-bangs' are another type, fired from close range. The moment you hear the 'whiz,' they explode 'bang' near the trench. We can hear shells from the big long-range guns screaming through the air all the time. . ."

FLORENCE, October 6th, 1915.

MY DEAR BOBBY,

How would you like to be a Montenegrin, supposing you could not be a Yankee? They're the pluckiest people in the world. I wonder if you realise that after Serbia was attacked last year by Austria, this little mountain race of war-like shepherds, in the face of all Europe, declared war on Austria, because their friend Serbia was attacked? There's a saying that "To be born in Montenegro is to be born without fear." Not bad, that; eh?

How would you like to be a San Marinian? (Always supposing you could not live in New Jersey!) In this case, we can avoid any aspersions you want to cast upon kings and queens, and Czars and so forth; for San Marino is a republic. High up on a mountain in the province of Emilia, is tiny, beautiful, ancient San Marino. It's quaint, and it's mediæval---or earlier still. (I won't bore you by giving you any date: you have enough of them at school, and nobody likes them.) It's brown and it's golden, and in the distance, from its piazza, you can see the Adriatic and Rimini.

When Italy joined in the war, little San Marino---about two miles long, and with at least half a dozen people, in the population--hesitated about declaring war upon Austria. (Brave as a lion!) Oh, San Marino's "all wool," if it's only "a yard wide"! Finally, being as discreet as it is valorous, the little republic decided to maintain what she called a Benevolent Neutrality. (Bobby, my boy, that's what I hope you're doing in the U.S.A.)

Well, just think of what little San Marino has done, up there on its copper-coloured hill, with Italy at its feet. Whenever an Italian resident of San Marino was called to serve his country, called to the colours, the good little republic paid his salary whilst he was away. They raised forty thousand francs for the national fund for the soldiers; they raised a lot of money for the Red Cross; there's a feminine league and a masculine league up there to help Italy; and when charming little Rimini was bombarded like fury by the Austrian warships---a tower blown off a church, a roof blown off, a house blown down here and there---benevolent little San Marino sent down to Rimini and fetched up all the little orphans from the schools and brought them all up to the hills to take care of them.

Bobby, I wish you could see those little orphans from the foundling asylums of Rimini, in snow-white dresses, with white hats and bare legs, black eyes and dark curls. I tell you there are some little rosebuds and peaches and fine little kids among them---well worth picking them up out of Rimini and saving them from the Austrian bombs. You see, the Austrians don't care much what they hit---not that they're good shots, but they don't care. They'd just as soon smash a priceless church to bits as rip up a beer saloon. They don't care! Beer and stained glass and rare old pictures and sausages and cheese are all alike to the Austrians and Germans. If San Marino is benevolently neutral, they are malevolently impartial.

Well, we've got something better to talk about, thank Heaven! than the Austrians and Germans.

When Italy declared war, San Marino quickly rushed down to the telegraph office and hurried off a telegram to the King, saying: "Viva l'Italia," "Long live the King!" and all sorts of benevolently unneutral things.

Don't you like it, Bobby?

There's nothing the matter with San Marino, is there?

Well, New Jersey's a pretty nice place, too. I hope it is benevolently neutral.

My dear boy, I send you many, many greetings from the countries at war. I wish you could see the splendid Italian soldiers. I wish you could see the splendid English Tommies. I wish you could see the splendid "poilus," as they call the Frenchmen who have lived in the trenches for over a year.

Some day, perhaps, Bobby, you'll come over to see your godmother, at the right time; and we'll stand together on the Champs Elysées and see the tide of that victorious army---French and English---come marching home.

FRASCATI, ROME, Oct. 15th, 1915.

DEAR FRIEND,

Four months ago I was enjoying American hospitality at the Guthries in New York, and taking part, there in America, in the discussions about America's position regarding the Great War.

I remember that one evening fourteen of us sat, and with the exception of four people, every one of us was for war. That was four months ago, and the United States has kept out of the conflict! Over here it rather amuses us to think that the U. S. A. fancies that the reason that the Germans haven't submarined every passenger boat that has put out to sea is as a personal favour to the U. S. You see, we over here have not been allowed to whisper that it is England---great, wonderful, silent, strong, effective England---that has smashed up the submarine menace. Even so early as the first of July, a few people who heard a few things that they were not meant to hear knew pretty well what England was able to do regarding the submarines; and you can't be surprised if it has amused us a little bit. Like a great, mighty hand, powerful and terribly impressive, England has closed down over the ships that meant havoc to neutrals as well as to those at war.

I expect that this will all be cut out by the censor, but I am hoping to pass it. I hope so, for I do with all my heart wish that full justice should be done to England.

The other night, when I arrived at the Grand Hotel from Florence, on my way here, I happened to hear of Lady -----, who had just arrived from England en route for the Dardanelles, where she was going to disinter the body of her favourite son, a boy of eighteen. It seemed so pathetic to me to realise that lonely woman's presence in that cold, deserted hotel, the errand and all it meant was so tragic and so pathetic, that I couldn't resist the impulse to write her a note and tell her that there was a human heart beating in the place for her and that I felt her grief. I also left her, when I left, the flowers that had made my rooms sweet for the few hours that I passed there. Out here in Frascati, this letter came to me, my dear friend, and I think you will be as touched as I was by its tragic pathos:

To be a Frenchwoman or an Englishwoman and bear many sons is to-day just to number yourself among the women with aching hearts.

I had a note from my friends in Limoges, whose ambulances are all full to overflowing.

This last French victory has crowded Paris with wounded. The American Ambulance has 610 patients! But since you are interested in the war, here is Mrs. Munroe's last letter to me---- It speaks for itself:

"In answer to your questions about Miss Davies, she is a mighty brave woman. She has gone to London . . . and I have no photograph of her and am not at liberty to give one without her permission. Miss Davies has been with us a long time. She was neither a nurse nor an auxiliary, but worked in the pathological service, first with Dr. Jaldon and then with Dr. Taylor. The latter knew nothing of her intention to inoculate herself with this terrible gas gangrene. When it had declared itself, she sent for him. He was in a terrible state of anxiety, gave her at once his treatment, and saved her. It was a very plucky thing to do. He tells me her case is not an absolute proof, for of course she was a clean case, not an infected one; but all the same, his discovery is a tremendous aid to that deadly poison. She is quite well now. I had a letter from her and I think she will come back to us again before long. We are so busy we have not a moment to breathe. This last splendid attack and advance has cost us dear, and brought in many badly wounded. We have put in extra beds, and the other night we had to put up cots in every corner, having 609 patients. We are evacuating and receiving new wounded day and night---some such awful cases it makes one sick. If only we could annihilate those brutes! I have no news of my boy since two weeks. What hard and anxious times! Anne Vanderbilt is sailing on October 30th. That is my one joyful piece of news. . . Hope to see you soon."

To-morrow I am going to spend Sunday at the American Embassy with Mrs. Page. She tells me that she has just received from Washington for the Italian soldiers, through Miss Borden, frs. 4000 worth of flannel for night shirts and 15,000 yards of cotton cloth. A pretty generous gift, isn't it? She says that the gifts to Italy from America which pass through her hands come pouring in all the time and that it is a pleasure to dispense such ready and such constant generosity.

America seems very, very far away. That dangerous sea lies between us, and though---thanks to England---the horror is minimised, it still lies there in mine and periscope. I had one terrible crossing and I assure you that I dread another; and yet, I have so many interests there that call me---my book, my cinematograph rights, and the great, big, magnetic and human appeal of those I so deeply love. If one only had half a dozen lives and could spend them as one would! Do you know, I'm almost inclined to say that I'd spend five and a half of them in Italy! That's "going some," isn't it? It looks very decided, for me. But the other half I'd spend in New York, at the top of some high building, around the Fifties, with all that original, crude, brilliant outline of the lighted mountains of the city houses. The home skies seem very lovely to me sometimes; and just now I am turning my back on Italy and going back to France.

To-night, as I look out of my windows here, the Roman Campagna stretches away, in a floor as level as the sea floor, clear to the sea. Within my vision, to the left, is the narrow silver band where the Mediterranean meets the Campagna; and there is a little indentation in the coast at Fumicino, where the yellow Tiber pours its gold into that shining silver sea. It's divine. I know the course of that river well, you know, as J saw it rise in the Apennines, up under the snows, and mile by mile followed it down here to its mouth.

But even more beautiful than that vision of silver water is the luminous mist, like a cloud, just there upon the landscape where Rome is---so bright itself that its reflection cast up against the sky is almost like moonshine. This Campagna, in the changing lights---brown, blue, reddish, golden---baffles any words I have to give to you its charm.

You know that all around Frascati are celebrated villas where, as I saw to-day, over the rocks, never failing, never ceasing, cascades of water pour down into the basins of fountains that were built to hold them seven and eight hundred years ago. To-day, as I stood and looked down into the gathered waters of these basins, I thought I had never seen anything more marvellous in my life. These waters are a pale peacock blue---, because the marble is so lined with ancient moss.

People have written about Italian villas for a hundred years. Each writer tells you of the things that appeal to his special sense. Gardens without end have been described without ceasing: let me speak to you only of the fountains, the mellow stones that hold them---pink, orange, pale yellow; bring to your sense of hearing the music of these falling waters, whose messages to mankind have been for eight hundred years the same, but according to the ears that hear them eternally new.

Never, never, never have I dreamed of anything so satisfying as Italy. From the Province of Emilia, where I first began to feel this pervading, magnetic charm, down through Bologna, Ravenna, and Rimini to Florence, where Tuscany completely enchained me, and here to Rome, the charm has grown and grown.

I almost laid my life down in Rome a few years ago, as you remember; and I feel now as though I had found life again, and with a deeper meaning. Things that have come to me this time in Italy can never leave my soul as desolate, as naked, as it was before. Some of the gifts have been material, and some of them spiritual indeed.

You have always taken the greatest interest in Gaetano's motherless little child. She is here under the same roof with me and is now sleeping downstairs in her little crib---a rosebud baby, one of the most charming little creatures: a brown-eyed, golden-haired, delightful little girl.

As I close my letter, there comes from the distance the subdued sound of a passing train. The note fills me with sadness, for it forecasts one more journey---another of those many, many voyages that I am always taking; and this time it seems to me as though I could not go. . .

With love,

FLORENCE, October 8th, 1915.

DEAR FRIEND,

I heard of something last night so touching that I want to tell you about it, whilst its note is still ringing in my mind.

An Italian foundling---a poor, unknown chap---after a terrible battle from which he had escaped unhurt, wrote home to Florence---sent a letter out into the void, "to my unknown parents." Father and mother he had never known. A deserted child, brought up in the charity schools, the first time that he really met the world on an equal footing with others was when he went as a soldier.

His letter, with its lonely appeal, spoke to the heart of a high-born Italian woman---and they tell me she is a very well-known woman indeed. She wrote him a letter, which was published in the papers, telling him that she knew that he was a good man because he did not revile the parents who had deserted him; that he was no longer to consider himself alone in the world; that when he came back from the front her home would be open to him, and that from henceforth her family should be his family, and they were all prepared to receive him with open arms and try to make up to him for his past loneliness and unhappiness. And all this expressed in the most tender, graceful fashion.

The more I see of Italy, the more I adore the Italians. They have so much heart, so much cheerfulness and gaiety, so much good humour. And the way they sing! Every now and then, when a silence falls in the streets, it is broken by some sudden singing voice, with a mellowness and a sweetness that makes you thrill.

Among the people that Austria has dragged and pressed into her thinning ranks during these last dreadful weeks are the wandering gypsy tribes ---men unused to war, of course; unused to discipline; free as the air; and to whom rules are irksome and unknown. Many of these poor things, who had never worn shoes in their lives, dragged off their military boots and threw them away and went barefoot to the ranks. And one Romany, poor thing, longing for the music of his tribe, deserted, and when he was finally caught, confessed that he had only gone back to fetch his violin. Poor, poor creatures!

Signor Gozzini is an antiquity dealer. (Ah, you've caught me, haven't you? Of course, I've been into some of these fascinating shops!) Signor Gozzini is in uniform-grey, with a spotless white collar and one star on the collar of his tunic. He is all alone in the curiosity shop.

"Scusi, signora! Look; enjoy; see the things for yourself . . . . 1 used to think them beautiful. I've just come back from the Alps. I've been up there since the war began. All my other men have gone. Now I am back on four days' leave. These things," and he made a gesture with his graceful brown hand to the Genoese velvet, to the Venetian chairs, to the Florentine and Roman treasures, "seem very unreal now. I suppose they have prices: I suppose they're part of what I used to call my business . . . . Signora, I've seen men die like flies; I've seen the snow of the Alps stained to red. I've heard my fellow soldiers cry: 'Viva l'Italia!' and heard the sound stop short before it finished. . . . And I find myself down here."

He put his hand to his eyes for a moment.

"I hear my mother and sisters talk about the little scandals of Florence." (He made another gesture.) "Signora, don't think it strange if I say that I've gone beyond."

"It's a good thing," he added, "for Italy. It's a good thing for human souls, Signora. Perhaps we will all be poorer in our bank accounts, but every country that is fighting to-day has gone up higher. . .

This was an antiquity dealer in a Florence shop!

With devoted love,

PENSION CONSTANTIN, FLORENCE,
October 7th, 1915.

MY DEAR VIOLET,

Here, in this agreeable little pension, can you imagine how I think of you; can you imagine how easy it is for me to go back into our mutual past here? I seem to see you everywhere---in the streets, in this little study, with its quaint, old-fashioned air. Here I wrote three books in one year, and two of them were successful! None of them would have been accomplished without your companionship, your encouragement and your sweet presence. How grateful I am for all that unblemished past! As I look back upon it, there was not one cloud, from the time you came into my life until you left it. There have been many since---cruel ones; but that was all sunlight.

You loved Florence so much. Yesterday I thought of you so often and how you would have enjoyed the afternoon that Ernestine Ludolf gave me.

High up on a far-away hill-on one of those heaven-kissing hills that rise sharply above the city-is an old Medici villa, sublime in its isolation, almost untouched and unchanged. Egisto Fabbri has bought it, and here Ernestine and he have spent the summer, out of the world.

Ernestine sent her motor for me early in the afternoon, and it took me to the beginning of a tiny rocky road, going straight up into the sheer hill. There the motor stopped, and what do you think waited at the opening of the mountain-road, to carry me up into the hills? A low wooden sledge, filled with hay and drawn by two of those great, snow-white, serene oxen---those beautiful beasts that we have so often admired and for which Tuscany is famous. Slowly, this primitive vehicle slid softly up (if you can slide up) the hill, through olive orchards and grape vineyards, until we reached the summit; and there, in the garden of the villa, were the Contessa Ludolf and her brother.

"ERNESTINE SENT HER MOTOR FOR ME"

"FROM THE TERRACE YOU LOOK OVER MILES OF TUSCANY"

From the terrace, through the arches of those old stone windows, you look out over miles of blue and purple Tuscany, over far-away hilltops, over hillsides where are sparsely scattered other white and yellow and grey castles and villas. There is the veil of the olives drawn across the landscape; there's the purple and green of the grape vines. But I'm not going to describe it for you. It's beyond words to tell. Miles, miles, miles out of the world it seems; and such remoteness, such silence, with its spirit of contemplation and its atmosphere of peace, I have never dreamed of. The ilex and the cypresses rise straight and black in Egisto Fabbri's gardens.

On the terrace we had peasant bread and honey and tea; but better than that, we had a wonderful talk, for Ernestine's brother has a delightful mind and delightful things to say; and I am sure you can imagine what an afternoon it was.

You'll think it's frightfully conceited of me to say that 1 think we are the only tourists in Italy. I assure you I haven't seen any others. Just fancy the extraordinary pleasure of being in a country like this without any travellers, or Baedeker-carrying tourists to offend the eyes!

There are two Austrians interned here---an old gentleman and lady who are from the Trentino, and are prisoners in the pension and its garden. I dare say they wish they were tourists! But even this little cosmopolitan pension is full of Italian officers, coming here to appreciate the good food, and even native Florentines! The war, with its many changes, has brushed the tourist fly brusquely away.

This afternoon, Ernestine sent her motor again, and I went to the Certosa, where a snow-white monk took me through---I might say---a deserted monastery. There are a few of the silent brothers left, but most of them have gone to the war. Think of it! Torn by their countries' summons from that tranquillity, from that isolation, from that peace . . . . Standing in the cloister, the Tuscan hills and valleys on one side, the monastery gardens on the other, the snow-white brother said to me: "Pray for peace. We pray for peace."

Each monk has a tiny little house. Seen from a distance, these tiny little dwellings form a crenelated wall around the Certosa. Each monk has his cell, his study, a little window where, on a stone seat, he can sit and meditate, and a little garden to plant and tend. Here he eats alone, the food being passed in to him through a little window. It's the Silent System. Sundays and Thursdays they speak together in the garden; otherwise---silence.

There are only twenty of these brothers left---all old, for those in whom the blood is still young have gone to spill it on their countries' battlefields. Men to whom speech is almost strange, mingling with the shouting, screaming hordes on the field of battle! Here Austrian, French, Italian, German, English---these brothers lived together in a community of Peace, their mission service and prayer; and now they are fighting in different fields, they are enemies, with Hate for a common cause.

How strange!

"Have you any news from the monks who have gone to the war, Brother?"

"Three of them have fallen: one Frenchman and two Austrians."

"Do you know anything of the war here?"

"We have a few lines from our brothers at the front," he said, with a pathetic gesture of those unworldly hands---hands that for thirty-eight years have known none of the commerce of the vulgar world. "We never read the papers, it is forbidden. . . Pray for peace. We pray for peace. - .

I came away from the Certosa with a feeling of its silence in my soul---a sense of its sacred peace.

More and more, I am beginning to understand why every one who has ever accomplished anything really great and truly beautiful in the past has come to Italy---has lived here and stayed here until some of its imprint has enriched their souls.

Here is a very different picture, my dear; but you who love these touches and these charming little bits of life, will appreciate it. In this house there is an awfully pretty girl, who is studying music for the stage. She is a true American and comes from somewhere beyond Chicago. In speaking of the delightful cleverness, the astonishing, supple, civilised character of these people, she said:

"I ride a great deal and quite freely here, alone. The other morning, very early-about seven o'clock---on one of these lovely warm mornings, I went out to ride in the Cascine. The alley in which I rode was covered with falling leaves. As the sun had just risen, bright and gold, I seemed to ride right into the golden light.

"A young Italian city labourer, with a long, primitive-looking broom, was sweeping up the leaves. I always ride astride, as the custom of my country is, and I had on a soft cowboy hat. As I rode along like this, the path-sweeper stopped his work, and leaning on his broom, looked me directly in the eyes, threw his head back, and began to sing just one line-daringly, charmingly, in a full, fine voice:

The first bars of Johnson's solo in 'The Girl of the Golden West'!"

Just think of that quickness and cleverness on the part of a common street sweeper! Such a thing could not happen in any other country of the world, I am sure.

With best love,

LONDON, October, 1915.

MY DEAR MISS CARLISLE,

I have been thinking about you a great many times this year. No doubt this will come to you as something of a surprise, but, you know, these surprises are often the most interesting things in life. I wanted to ask you one or two questions, and I shall put them to you now in this country, of which you are a native and in which I am a stranger.

Why don't you come over to these countries at war?

Why don't you come over to England?

You are an English woman. You must love with fervour and passion this Empire that in such a marvellous way is making itself felt from one end of the world to the other.

You belong to the most merciful, and lately I have thought, the most beautiful profession that there is. You are a nurse. For years it has been your privilege to soothe, to help and to heal. Not only are you a nurse, but you are a wonderful one, a woman on whom one can rely, to whom one can give great charges.

You do not know what I have seen in the way of nursing these months and months of horror and of agony. I have seen great things. Don't for a moment think that I am judging you or criticising you, or even suggesting to you; this I would have no right to do. You see, I am simply talking to you across three thousand miles, and for the first time in my life saying anything to you at all. In the military hospital where I have been a nurse I have seen women come from America who depended entirely upon themselves for their livelihood. I have seen them give themselves month after month, with no remuneration, in order to bear something of this great burden in their own hands. These have been very poor women; I believe they have gone back richer than in any other way they could have been. Priceless lessons have been learned there in that military hospital. It is not the common nursing of the sick, you know. The routine is there. A scientific responsibility is there. Just as you know it-and of which you no doubt are heartily sick.

There are other things.

Here in these vast wards you are brought into contemplation of things you could never see in your life anywhere else: please God you will never see again. You are brought face to face with absolute heroism, with the most touching and wonderful courage. Remember, you are not nursing sick men; you are nursing sane, healthy, vigorous, splendid creatures, cut down, hewed down, slaughtered in the very flower of their life.

Oh, it is a wonderful thing to help these men!

To a woman of heart (and you have one), to a woman of imagination (and your imagination is rich and true), these experiences are precious beyond words.

Moreover, you are an English woman.

And your country is cruelly at war.

If I, as an American, feel these things in the wards with the English Tommies and French soldiers, I wonder to the very depths of my heart how their own women bear it and live.

Here, as I write you, I am sitting a little above the darkened streets of darkened London. You cannot think how this city that I love impresses me to-night. England has always been to me the most wonderful country of all countries, except my own. No doubt you think that is strange because I live in France. France is sublime,---but I am talking of England. To me the very name, the very word, has a sonorous beauty that makes something ring through me every time it is said. It is my language, to me the most beautiful of all, and I am sure that far back in my ancestry ---Dutch as it is, Latin as it is---some Anglo-Saxon forebear has left the strongest mark upon my fibre and my mind.

When this war is all over, every nation will know England better than it knows her now and will love her better than she is loved to-day. This great Empire on which the sun never sets, which all seas wash; this Empire whose responsibility has been so tremendous at the moment of its mother's need, the force that England is, the civilisation it represents, the understanding of peoples and races that England has, and the Goodness and the Benevolence that the Anglo-Saxon people represent, will be understood after the war as it never has been understood before.

I hope I am in no wise disloyal to France, where I live, and which I love. But there has been too much criticism of England to please the few who know something of what she is doing, what she can do, and what she will do yet. Not a boat crosses the sea to-day but owes its safety to England; all the commerce of the world is in her hands, and long ago the war would have reached its result if it had not been for her.

I stop as I write, to look down from my window here at the Carlton, into these shadowy streets; every lamp wears its hood; but in the darkness I can see them go---that long, long line. To-night it happens to be a detachment of a Highland regiment, marching down to Charing Cross. They go silently. There is no music. And, so many of them gone, how will they come home?

I have seen some of those who did come home as far as France. I have stood by their side and have heard them, as they looked up to me, say, "Thank you, Nurse," and I have done what I could for them, and they are not my people.

Why don't you come to England?

LONDON, November 3rd, 1915.

DEAR BESSIE,

You will be interested I know in a book that Mr. Lane is about to publish. It is called "A Book of Belgium's Gratitude." It is a graceful and touching idea. The refugees whom England and America have housed and helped and saved have conceived the idea of publishing a volume which shall be an expression of their appreciation to the Empire and the United States. The Neutrality of Belgium, the British Guarantee, the Belgian Relief Fund, England's Organisation of Hospitality, and many other things relative to the conditions are in the book. It is under the patronage of the King of the Belgians, and among the Committee are Emile Cammaerts, Emile Claus, Henri Davignon, Jules Destrée, Paul Lambotte, Baron Moncheur, and Chevalier E. Carton de Wart. Goblet d'Alviella, the Belgian Minister of Finance, Count Lalaing, Maeterlinck, M. Vandervelde, and Emile Verhaeren, too, are contributing to the volume. It interests me enormously, and I think it will be a great document. It will be printed in French and English and W. J. Locke has undertaken to act as Translation Editor. Miss Margaret Lavington is acting as Secretary. The book is written and illustrated by the most prominent Belgian Refugees in England and America, and Lord Curzon, Lord Cromer, Lord Dillon, Lord Latymer, Lady Paget, the Right Hon. Herbert Samuel, Miss Elizabeth Asquith, Mrs. Lewis Harcourt, the Hon. Mrs. J. H. Ward, Miss May Sinclair, Horace Annesley Vachell, and many others are translating these tributes to England. The more formal announcement of the book is: A BOOK OF BELGIUM'S GRATITUDE: In recognition of the help and hospitality given by the British Empire, and of the relief bestowed by the United States of America during the Great War.

I am very proud that Eugene d'Alviella is amongst these authors.

This is my eighth trip across the Channel since the war began, and it has taken me twenty-four hours to come. You will be surprised, I know, dear, to learn that I am going to New York. You will be sorry too. I shall be "Home for Christmas." Do you know I am awfully pleased that "Good Housekeeping" has featured one of my "letters that never were written" in an enormous advertisement, "Home for Christmas" I hope with all my heart that we will all be back in Paris then and have one of those wonderful reunions for which we plan so often, and which, alas! do not seem to come. I wonder whether you will pass your Christmas in Petrograd? And perhaps I shall be on the sea.

I never felt so terribly saying good-bye to Mother as this time. You cannot think how sweet she was, how brave and truly charming. In her prettiest dress, her silver hair a glory around her face, she stood with Mabel in the open window of her little house and waved me such a gallant good-bye. Oh, she is a wonderful woman! There is no one like her. I shall be able to bear old age, I think, if year by year I grow more tender and more understanding towards it. And yet some one said to me once that the best preparation for old age was to keep in touch with the standpoints of the young.

It may be hard in a way to be in New York just now. I do not know how I shall find it. It seems to me from here that the thirty million Germans have multiplied and multiplied until they rule the spirit of my country. But this cannot be so---it cannot be so. I long so deeply to see in all Americans the proper understanding of this great issue, not an individual one, but a common one---the issue that should not only try men's souls, but make men's souls. America does not seem to realise that this Cause is a cause common to humanity, to Christianity, and to manhood.

In the old days, in the seventeenth century, ancestors of mine, French and Dutch, came to America to make their homeland there. In those days freedom and idealism were quite enough on which to build the foundations of a country and a state.

I feel in my soul that they are enough to build on and to fight for to-day.

It is a terrible thing to a patriotic American to see his country insulted, the lives of its people sacrificed, its property destroyed with wanton indifference, and to see across its whole fair shape the shadow of that Mailed Hand which is disfiguring Europe.

I followed through the Matin your progress in the East, and you cannot think with what intense interest I shall follow your journey home.

London to-night is a little darker, the lamps, once softened, are now encircled by blue shades, and there is a more marked absence of men. Here the evidences of what we all know are nevertheless not so great.

Under your window (for I stayed in your house just now while I was in Paris) all day long passed that sacred and solemn procession of the wounded, men without legs and arms, blind, and disfigured. It seemed as though those who could walk at all had been turned into the streets to make room for the flood of newly wounded men. It is terrible.

I embark to-morrow with faith because I have such confidence in England, and it has been a source somewhat of amusement to me when I have heard the United States diplomats flatter themselves that they have affected submarine warfare by Notes. England, mighty upon the seas, has done it all, and if it had not been for their fleet and the Genius of Marine there wouldn't be any Europe such as we know it to-day.

I send my greetings to Robert and to you, and they will find you on your far-off mission where you have gone to follow the war in the Far East, and I send you what is to us all a summons and a hope;