Girls High School - Yearbook (Reading, PA)

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A Letter from France ISS CONSTANCE HALLOCK, teacher of French and history in our , school, left last year to enter the Canteen Service of the Y. M. C. A. She is now working in France and sends very interesting letters to the teachers of the High School. The following is one of her letters:- Dear Miss ........ :- The mail service seems to be improving so much that I hope the enclosed bit of native workmanship will reach you in time for Christmas. If it doesn't, please consider it a valentine or a St. Patrick's Day present, or whatever may happen to be the nearest holiday. I am at St. Nazaire, on the coast of Brittany, right where the Loire flows into the sea. This is perhaps not the picturesque heart of Brittany that you read about in story-books, but it is so old-world, just the same, that I haven't yet got over my delight at some of the things I see on the streets. It is a gray little stone town right on the edge of the water, with little black-sailed fishing-boats tipping along beside big blue and white camouflaged ocean-going vessels, sisters from the convent school, in gray Quaker-like costumes, shepherding a double row of girls in blue dresses and blue sailor hats to church ibut you notice that the blue orphans get a look now and then to and from the swarming American soldiers and sailorsj. The school boys and older men almost all wear the omnipresent blue caps with a hood, wooden shoes go clattering along the streets, and all the women of thirty or over wear white head-dresses of their particular locality. The woman who delivered the coal briquettes for my fireplace tin a push cartj had something like a stulied Tam-O'-Shanter on her head, covered with white lace, the little chubby old country woman who peels potatoes all day long in the canteen kitchen wears a cap with the stiii' strings looped up beside her ears, and another woman who works in the kitchen, whom everyone calls Finisterre because she comes from there, wears a peaked cap of white embroidery like a teacup bottom side up on top of her head. 1 want to get several of the different kinds before I go home, also some wooden shoes and some more lace. The lace is simply wonderful, not only the Brittany net work such as I send you, but Cluny and Venise, Valenciennes and Beaunais-I saw a little Alencon handkerchief today that cost Eve hundred francs-a hundred dollars. Imagine a little city the size of Pottsville having shops with such things as that! But, on the other hand, truth compels me to state that ,though Pottsville may not have four or tive shops at which you can procure priceless Alencon lace, still its streets are not six inches deep in liquid mud all time, and it has at least heard of modern plumbing and furnace-heated houses. If they would only combine the pictur- esque with the sanitary, how happy we all should be! Paris was wonderful, and in the eight days that I was there I managed to squeeze in considerable poking about the city, between lectures and conferences and office appointments which were necessary before the General Headuarters would send us out. I never had so many dealings with the police before in my 23

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Girls' High School Graduates in Military C Nurses, Caroline Albright Helen Brossman Mabel Bucks Florence M. Burky Lillian Foreman Esther Fricker Florence Gerhardt Elizabeth Hodgkins Emily A. Holmes Mary Hunsberger Service lltll 5' ' ff Canteen Workers, Yeomenj Emma Loose Emma Martin Mary Schere Mabel Schofer Marian Seidle Katherine Spang Mary Catharine Stevens Florence Strause Helen Yerkes 2?

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life, nor left my photograph in so many rogues' galleries, either. There are half a dozen cards and papers which they tell you to guard as your lite, and carry them with you all the time, so that even the voluminous pockets of our uniforms are bulging with otticial documents and certificates. Police head- quarters are right up back of Notre Dame, so I took in the cathedral, the Hotel de Ville, the Saint-Chapelle and the Conciergerie that one afternoon. I don't see why the pictures can't show lots of other things about Notre Dame-the lovely little grayish-green garden at the back, with the delicate stone-work of the apse and its slender flying buttresses projecting out into it, and the fact that the top of every projection is very light gray and the side dark, on acocunt of the way the rain washes the dust down, I suppose, so that it isn't all one color by a good deal. The carvings around the doors were all covered by sand-bags, and the big colored windows all boarded up, to protect them from air raids, so the interior was very dark, and I didn't have time to go up on the roof, but I'll probably get back there sometime. One day we went out to St. Germain-des-Pres, the church from which the signal was rung for the massacre of St. Bartholomew. It is a grim, worn old place, with a square plain tower capped with a pyramid-shaped short steeple, one or two little windows deep in the stone at regular intervals up the tower, and no windows for lighting visible from the street. It looks its part, all right! In America we have no conception of what old, old stone is like, nor how it seems to take on the character of things that have passed there. On the main streets of Paris nobody pays any attention to Americans, for there are more of them than there are of the French, I do believe, but in these out of the way parts of the city every one is interested. The little old women in black who take the part of sextons tfor men, old or young, are too valuable elsewhere, wanted to tell me all about it, and as the other girl with me stopped to make a little sketch outside, the policeman came up with more tales of the old abbey that used to stand beside it, destroyed in the Revolution, and of the secret passage under the fields tpre means held, though it's now in the midst of Parisj which used to run to another monastery a mile away. They used the passage as a burial place also, and when in modern times they took it over for part of the city sewage system they found the skeletons of dozens of the monks who had been buried there. We hadn't time to go out to Versailles, but, anyway, after twelfth century abbeys and sixteenth century Huguenots and Notre Dame and Henry of Navarre, Versailles seemed hopelessly modern and commonplace. I think we two, my hotel room mate and I, saw more of Paris than all the rest of the Y. M. C. A. people put together who were there for the same length of time, for through my school combination of history and French I already knew what the most interesting things about Paris were, and also by diligent study of a map of the city I also knew where most of them were too. So every morning when we started out for the office we'd map out a route that took in at least a peek at something interesting, and then walk. The others didn't know Paris and were afraid of getting lost, so they would go in taxis, but we had lots more fun our way. We came through the Invalides grounds that way once, and I hereby 24