opening a box-like affair above the front wheel.

"How the devil do you say trimmings?" murmured Watson. "Ici petit, petit-no, no, no; . . . ici marteau, tools. See? Ici-what's the word for occupants, Sergeant?"

He gave that up, and moved on to the next ambulance body, which a soldier was varnishing.

"Après fini là-bas, c'est ici pour-paint. What's the word for paint?" he asked himself. Turning to me with a beaming smile, he said convincingly, "Couleur." Private Watson pried open a freshly painted green door, and explained, while he wiped the paint off his penknife: "Pour ventilation. Troy petit portes-oon, oon, oon. Americans beaucoup fresh air." He inhaled and exhaled with vigor, so I should not miss the lesson. "Here heat," pointing to a little grating. Then, "Pour chaud. Peut-être froid at the front."

I was examining a tin drum-like affair under the front seat.

"Un reservoir pour de l'eau?" I asked. "Oui, oui. Tell her the big one above is for gasolene, Sergeant."

Watson walked swiftly ahead of us, glancing at ambulance after ambulance.

"Sergeant, you are a rascal," said I. "Are you sure these boys don't know me? I lectured a while ago at the Y. M. C. A. hut, you remember."

"Fixed that, too, Mrs. Gibbons. Oh, Lord, this is real stuff! Only one man in the shop has seen you before, and he promised to keep his mouth shut. Fire some more questions at him."

The sergeant covered his face with his handkerchief, and his giggles with a thorough nose-blow as Watson plucked my coat-sleeve gently and pointed to a finished ambulance at the end of the line.

"Here Croix Rouge et U. S. medical insignia. Dernière chose. Ambulance fini, fini maintenant. Say, Sergeant, tell her these ambulances are for wounded, but they are also the wagons that take you out and don't bring you back. You stay there by request. Tell her we work like the devil in this shop. If any man

slows down, we ask him if he is working for Uncle Sam or the kaiser."

"Combien de temps faut-il pour faire une ambulance, Monsieur?" I asked. "Don't get you. Gosh!" cried my interpreter, with startled eyes.

"It's all right, Watson," said the sergeant; "she wants the real dope on our output. One ambulance every four hours."

Then followed a discussion between the private and the sergeant that revealed to me much about the spirit of the outfit and the quantity of work produced.

"Be sure she gets that dope straight,' called a soldier as he ducked behind an ambulance. He was laughing.

The sergeant steered us quickly into a little room, where Watson said:

"Ici peinture-you said that was the word for paint, Sergeant?"

For answer he patted Watson on the back and said:

"Look here, boy, we have been putting over a dirty trick on you. This lady is not a French journalist. She is Mrs. Gibbons, the mother of the Little Gray Home in France."

Watson's blue eyes gave me a long look. With his right fist he pushed his campaign. hat away back on his head and groaned.

"It's a shame," said I, "to have treated. you like this." I slipped a cigarette-case out of my pocket and asked, "Will you show me you forgive me by smoking one of my cigarettes?"

Watson took the cigarette and burst out laughing.

"Gee! I'm a donkey," he cried. “That sure is a good one on me!"

"I suppose you are thinking about the guying you will get," I said. "But listen to me. I'll tell you right now the impression I should have got, had I really been a French journalist. If what I say tallies with the truth, that 's all you 'll need. You know I 've never been in this shop before to-day."

As I talked, the private smiled more and more, and when I finished, his pleased comment was:

“To think I got away with that, and I learned my French from a laundress!"

Vol. 97

No. 5

HAD this tale straight from the second mate of the wrecked ship Tankard. He was an Esthonian by birth, by name Aronowsky. Cap

tain Wilkinson of the Tankard had called him the grandest liar in Christendom before taking leave of him; but for my part, I think he was telling the truth. He was the sort of man who had to tell the truth, indeed, or forfeit all those grimy papers that gave him standing as a political being. He carried them all in a brown envelop, even down to his birthcertificate; and if he lost even the least of them, he would find himself at once in a very ugly fix, and might even be deported, he feared. So long had he been subject to the probe of official eyes, tongues, fingers, all but pinch bars, that the habit of telling the truth, walking a chalk-line, and having documentary evidence to bear him. out had become the least of his precautions.

"I don't usually say more than I have to," he told those of us who were loafing in the shipping offices, waiting for a ship. "Not to them, anyways," and he jerked his head toward the captains' room. This policy of silence under probe dated from his first exile from Russia, when he had

traveled the length of his native state on a flat-car laden with frozen beeves in two long rows, the whole covered with tarpaulin. At sidings he had to bear with a soldierly practice of thrusting bayonets, like darning-needles, through the concealing canvas in search of just such as he. All Russia was divided into the hunter and the hunted. Once the cold steel had pierced the calf of his leg, but he had not cried out. Indeed, he had the presence of mind to wipe the bayonet clean of blood with his coat as it was being withdrawn from his wound.

"If I had so much as whimpered," he informed us, "I would never have been assigned to lucky Wilkinson's ship, and you would not be hearing from me now."

"You say Jim Trojan was third of this ship?"

"His second trip, I believe."

"He was a hard case as I remember him."

"He had taken orders too long to be able to give them, however," said Aronowsky. "To look at him, though, you would say he was one of those chaps who drive nails with their fists and pull them out again with their teeth."

He had been a seaman too long to make

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