In the morning a hawker and his wife went down the street at a foot-pace, singing to a very slow, lamentable music “ O France, mes amours. ” It brought everybody to the door; and when our landlady called in the man to buy the words, he had not a copy of them left. She was not the first nor the second who had been taken with the song. There is something very pathetic in the love of the French people, since the war, for dismal patriotic music-making. I have watched a forester from Alsace while someone was singing “ Les malheurs de la France ,” at a baptismal party in the neighbourhood of Fontainebleau. He arose from the table and took his son aside, close by where I was standing. “Listen, listen,” he said, bearing on the boy’s shoulder, “and remember this, my son.” A little after he went out into the garden suddenly, and I could hear him sobbing in the darkness.