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Sierra Club Bulletin 



anyway, and so we took the chance. There can't be a lovelier city in the 

 world. I'll never forget the sight of the great Place de la Concorde or 

 the front of the Madeleine and the shadowy arches of the bridges and the 

 light in the river and the wonderful bulk and majesty of Notre Dame. 

 Each time I look at Notre Dame I wonder will it be there unharmed 

 when I go back again. Paris has been marvelously spared so far — not 

 one of her historic beauties marred. And there was no air raid after 

 all." . . . 

 August 25, 1918. 



. . . 'It is all so different from my thoughts of it at home. My 

 imagination had somehow never got beyond the first flow of the refu- 

 gees from the invaded districts — the flood along the roads and in the 

 Paris gares, the emergency work of supplying their first needs. That is 

 over now — we'll hope forever ! — and what I find are forgotten, neglected 

 exiles, half-fed, half-clothed, lodged frequently in crowded, smelly, 

 dark, frightfully unsanitary holes, sitting the long day through without 

 occupation or amusement or companionship except with other exiles 

 equally unhappy. After all they have been through, some of them liv- 

 ing for eighteen months or two years under shell-fire, do you wonder 

 that these stunned, bewildered, underfed creatures are rapidly develop- 

 ing into a pauper class, recognized as a serious menace to the whole 

 future of France ? . . . 



"You can't work among these refugees for a week without coming to 

 feel that under the dirt and squalor and laziness and all the misery that 

 has been accumulating on them during four years of war there is some- 

 thing very fine and brave and true. I am getting instances every day — 

 things I want to tell you in some letter, but as usual this has grown 

 unconscionably long already. But I'd like you to see my Sister of 

 Charity with her fifty orphan boys with whom she lived in a cellar at 

 Bailleul for two years now crowded into a tumble-down old building in 

 a village where every drop of water has to be fetched uphill for about 

 an eighth of a mile — ^^and it takes a lot of water to keep fifty small boys 

 as clean as they are! Or the young French doctor, invalided home, in 

 very poor health, running a military and a civil hospital and practicing 

 throughout a district about thirty miles square — the only doctor for 

 40,000 inhabitants ! And he has time to make special friends with a sol- 

 dier from Tunis because he's so far from home and probably won't get 

 well. You'd just love that doctor ! . . . 



''Yesterday was Labor Day, and next Monday's Admission Day, and 

 I suppose you all went to the woods. I had one lovely mountain day 

 up on the edge of the Pyrenees three weeks ago, when I went to visit 

 Irving Clark's institution at Eaux Bonnes. We found eidelweiss and 

 lovely big purple aquilegias and yellow Iceland poppies, pentstemons 

 and heather and lots of charming flowers." . . . 



September 5, 1918. 



