When the head of the house fixed the prices she meant to charge us for our accommodations, he spoke up and suggested that the rate was scarcely high enough; and also, since her regular patrons had been driven away at the beginning of the war, he advised us that sizable tips on our leaving would probably be appreciated.
Next morning we rose from a breakfast--the meat part of it having been furnished from the German commissary--to find twenty lancers exercising their horses in a lovely little natural arena, walled by hills, just below the small eminence whereon the house stood.

It was like a scene from a Wild West exhibition at home, except that these German horsemen lacked the dash of our cowpunchers.

Watching the show from a back garden, we stood waist deep in flowers, and the captain's orderly, when he came to tell us our automobile was ready, had a huge peony stuck in a buttonhole of his blouse.

I caught a peep at another soldier, who was flirting with a personable Flemish scullery maid behind the protection of the kitchen wall.

The proprietress and her daughters stood at the door to wave us good-by and to wish us, with apparent sincerity, a safe journey down into France, and a safe return.
To drop from this cozy, peaceful place into the town of Dinant again was to drop from a small earthly paradise into a small earthly hell.
Somewhere near the middle of the little perdition our cavalry captain pointed to a shell of a house.
"A fortnight ago," he told us, "we found a French soldier in that house -- or under it, rather.