Girls High School - Yearbook (Reading, PA)

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state that my rather lukewarm opinion of Napoleon went up at least forty-Eve per cent. after that. l had crossed the Pont Alexander lll before, and as it was too misty then to see the Invalides, l just put it down as a sort of blaring piece of bragging, with those great golden-winged statues on top of tall pillars. But when you stand in the middle of the great open space before the old build- ing, with the dome of the Invalides rising into the mist behind it, and the golden wings glittering above the river away oti' in front of it, you feel that it's alto- gether suitable as a whole, though you may not like parts of it separately. When you go along the streets in Paris and an American soldier salutes you tfor they almost always do salute the Y and the Red Cross girls, though, of course, there's no regulation that they musty, you feel quite chesty and set up, but when you go to the lnvalides and a crippled soldier in a faded sky-blue coat chirks up and salutes on seeing you, you have only one thought, and that is that nobody alive at the present time is going to live long enough to see America make up her arrears for not having entered the war long before she did. And, as so often has happened, England has done more than her share of tighting and working, and isn't getting the credit at all. There is no lack of food in France that l can see, excepting of sugar and dairy products, whereas everyone who came to France via England, or has been in England for any reason, speaks of how much worse ofi' they are there than here. They have such a way of putting their worst foot forward that the average Frenchman doesn't half appreciate them, and as for the Americans, if there's one country in the world they know less about than France, it's England! And as the bloomin' Britisher can't dissociate himself from his tight little island, even after having been trench companion to almost every nationality in creation for four years, things don't seem to progress very rapidly. The trip from Paris here I made, unfortunately, on a rainy, foggy day, so although l passed through the Chateau country, l couldn't see those that stood back from the river any distance. l saw Amboise, however, and Samur, and an old, old tower in Nantes called Anne of l3rittany's chateau. A French- man in the train pointed them out to me as we passed, I hope l can come back in better weather and when not on business bent. lt's all very well to be a 'tmilitaire and have every one on the jump to do things for you because you're an American and in uniform, but civilian life has its advantages in the way of leisure. One thing-among many-that l am delighted with is to find that my American-made French simply works beautifully. I talk to any one and every one and we all Gnd ourselves perfectly well understood. A merry Christmas, and remembrances to every one. Atfectionately, CONSTANCE HALLOCK. We suggest a monument Io the ffl-537.65 who put lhe doughnuts in the doughboysf'-Exchange. 25

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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

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CLASS SONG Naomi A. Riegel The reveille has sounded, And we needs must answer the call, For the world is calling boldly On the other side of the wall. Down the Sea of Life we're drifting, But to the shore of Memory we'll steer For the spirit of the Rose and Silver ls calling loud and clear. Four years of hardships and toil Have awakened our dormant soulsg We see from the threshold of the world The tide of success as it rolls. We hope our future will he As bright as the stars in the sky, And if it is, we owe it all To dear old Reading' High. 26