their drawings she stored in her desk. Each evidence of her worth in their eyes was infinitely precious. Laurence, throwing himself against her, his ardent eyes upon her face, would say

"Promise me you'll marry nobody but me, mother, when I'm big," and Rosa would run to squeeze her fat little person into the embrace, saying, "Me too, mother, me too."

And then they would quarrel over her, these two lovers, passionate in their admiration, and jealous for her possession, and she, knowing how brief must be their reign, how many her rivals, would thank God for this little time of absolute sovereignty.

Of change in herself Christina reckoned little. She had submitted to the discipline of motherhood gladly. Her

old self, exacting, capricious and fanciful, had slipped away from her. What the conventual system does by careful art, Nature does to every mother who is willing to obey. Christina had submitted, and all unknowingly been chastened. That physical discipline, the asceticism, the fatigues, the sharp anguish of birth, the daily care of the nursing mother, all these had been hers, and she had accepted them cheerfully for her children's sake.

She came for the first time to feel a pity for the woman who had displaced Mrs. Warwick Brown, and assumed the legal position of wife to the erring husband.

"Now that she has a child she'll be different," she said, as she discussed the event with her neighbor.

"Poor little innocent thing, what a position and what an inheritance for a child," sighed Mrs. Vere Brown.

"Yes, who could blame her if she does turn out badly?" answered Christina, no prescience of the future falling on her with the words. But that night she prayed for the Warwick Brown baby that grace might prevail against heredity.

Of coming change Christina was all unaware. Yet when she looked back to the days that ended the old order, it seemed to her that they had much of that clear brilliance which often precedes storm. She had come to feel a pleasant security in her happiness. Her life was full of duties and little interests. It followed a routine that seemed as if it might stretch into eternity.

Looking back, it seemed to her that one December Sunday was the crown of the old order of things.

The day was very mild, as the days so often are before Christmas. Mr. Ingleby called early to suggest a walk towards the country. Mark agreed readily. On Sunday afternoon he missed the little works that his conscience forbade him, and he loved to walk out in proud possession of his children. Christina suggested duties that would keep her in the house, but Mr. Ingleby would take no refusal.

"We must all go," he said; "it is a day when every Briton is abroad. We'll bring mail-carts or anything you wish for the little one."

Mark looked fondly at the little sturdy daughter who was playing near the sofa.

"Rosa can walk very far-can't you, Rosa? And if she's tired I'll carry her."

He pulled the child to his knee, smoothing back her curls with a large caressing hand. There shone in his eyes that passion of proud fatherly devotion that some men expend on their daughters. Christina, looking at him at this moment, knew that she had at least given him his dearest treasure. In her daughter she had her own unconscious rival, an object of worship perfectly satisfactory, because the worshiper expected but scant return.

"I'll go with daddy," said the child. "And me with mother," Laurence's

voice called from a corner where he was reading.

Christina's eyes beamed gratitude on her first-born.

"Suppose you children find out if any of the Browns can come too," she suggested; "Jack will, I'm certain, and Theo and Harry. We'll keep them to tea."

A little later the whole party set out, the elders walking behind, the children scampering ahead, Rosa's hand held by the kindly Jack Brown, who, having been long apprenticed to nursery cares, always took on himself the charge of babies.

Jack was at this time a lanky schoolboy, very shy and gruff, always in garments a little short in the sleeves, always in boots with an embarrassing squeak, but always a favorite. He had small taste for books, but an astonishing taste for mechanics; and Jack's electrical machines, his mills and engines and dynamos, were a perpetual interest to his own family and to all his neighbors.

her

Jack's good nature was the prey of everybody. He was sent for stamps and butter and herrings and reels of thread at any moment after he had straggled home from school. He was his mother's right-hand man, lover, her cavalier, her faithful servant. All Jack's dreams set to the day when he should come home rich and with a motor for the over-worked mother. Of his father he was tolerant. "I don't think my father has proper scope," was his judgment.

Jack was always delighted to fall in with other people's convenience, and to walk with little Rosa Travis was quite to his mind.

On this fine Sunday all the world seemed to be abroad.

"It is the festival of British parenthood, isn't it?" asked Mr. Ingleby, as they passed innumerable perambulators and parents.

"A humdrum life is very pleasant after all," said Mark. "We are Tom, Dick and Harry I suppose, but I don't ask anything better; do you, mother?"

The Christina of their courtship days had been entirely absorbed in the later title "mother," and Christina was satisfied. Looking at her children as they ran before her, she answered smiling.

"No, I don't want anything better, daddy, just that it should go on—and on. Why won't they stay children longer?"

Mark took her arm. He had grown rather stout, and walked slowly like the pug, who, very stout, and elderly, waddled behind them.

"They will grow up and marry, my dear, and we old people shall remain, and you, Ingleby, you must stay near us."

"Please God," said Mr. Ingleby.

They walked to the country roads that were SO near Westhampton. Beyond the town lay this district of hill and valley, copse, stream and pastureland.

"I love the winter landscape," said Christina; "it is more soothing than the summer. Summer is too beautiful. It taxes one's capacities, or it challenges a response that only youth can give. Is it that, Mr. Ingleby?"

"Have you too found out that? It is so with me. I love the quiet dun beauties of the winter world. You must seek them out. As you say, the summer and the spring overwhelm one. They are too prodigal; there is no time to appreciate them. But in winter one has leisure to notice each little delicate loveliness. It is a season quite in harmony with middle age."

The children ran shouting ahead and then rushed back. Rosa's red coat was a flash of color in the quiet tones of the countryside.

"Oh! if my third baby were here!" said Christina quickly; "one child never makes up for another."

"Would you wish it otherwise?" asked Mr. Ingleby. "They are separate beings."

"No, he is mine wherever he is. And as you said to me at the time, Mr. Ingleby, this communion of all souls makes life far more beautiful. You said to me then, do you remember? 'If we had not our dead we should be like a night without stars.' I have thought of it often."

Mark, thinking out his platitude carefully, uttered it with that pleasant sense of originality which the platitude-maker so often enjoys. "I'm sure sorrow teaches us sympathy," he said. "See how close we three have grown to each other. You have had your troubles, Ingleby, I'm certain."

"Yes," said Mr. Ingleby, "my sorrow has been one which is perhaps harder to bear than death, a life of sorrow for one I loved. But it was ended last week. I never told you of this trouble, though some people knew it. My mother was out of her mind. This mental trouble became so acute that I had to put her in a home, where she could receive constant care and proper treatment. I went often to see her, but it brought her no pleasure. But this strange mystery of her purgation is over, thank God."

Christina understood now that asceticism of habit which many called stinginess in Mr. Ingleby.

"We never knew," she said quickly. "Oh! I'm so sorry-and you who have comforted us have never been bitter or rebellious yourself."

"Yes I have, but those days are passed."

"Can you understand?"

"Understand the mystery of suffering? No, I can only believe that it is eventually transmuted into good.

In the mystical life of the saints this 'dark night of the soul' seems, as it were, the ante-chamber to the celestial brightness. not the less because this state of the soul has a physical cause. My mother was of the saints, a Puritan saint, narrow and strict; perhaps the revelation of the Beatific Vision has been the more radiant to her on that account."

I believe it is often so,

There was silence between the three for a while. Rosa had fallen down and Mark hastened forward to dry her tears and wipe her knees with his handkerchief.

"How he idolizes that child," said Ingleby, with a smile. Christina looked tenderly at them both.

"Thank God," she said quietly, "that if I have failed him in much I have at least given him the perfect romance of life, a child."

The afternoon fell in molten gold behind the trees, the air grew chilly, and they hurried home to the firelit room and the cheerful tea-table. All the time Christina was curiously conscious of her happiness. She seemed to grasp with both hands the joy of this ordinary life. She realized the precious relationships of home, father, mother and children. During the eight years that had passed, her own parents had died, and she had become the more keenly aware of the value of domestic ties.

After supper she and her husband sat on the sofa, his warm, fat hand holding hers. In this position he shortly fell asleep, his head resting on the sofa cushion. Mr. Ingleby smiled at her over his eyeglasses and went on reading.

At ten o'clock he rose and took leave.

"Good-bye, my dear friends," he said, "and God be with you."

At the little garden gate he turned

to look back at them standing in the hall together. It was scarcely a week

Among the important problems which will be discussed at the Peace Conference, that of Alsace-Lorraine particularly concerns France; but it is a problem which none of those nations today fighting for justice and right can ignore, for Alsace-Lorraine is a question of justice and right to us.

In order to explain this question to foreigners, and even to Frenchmen who have not perhaps deeply considered it, we have undertaken to give a simple and brief account of it.

I. PAST HISTORY OF ALSACE-
LORRAINE.

A short historical survey is first of all necessary.

The actual region of Alsace-Lorraine was, twenty centuries ago, a part of Gaul, which was bounded at the east by the Rhine. The ancestry of the population is Gallic, just as in the rest of France. Later inhabitants of Alsace-Lorraine fought with Vercingétorix against Cæsar, in order to defend the independence of their common country. When Rome conquered Gaul they absorbed the Latin culture in the same way as the rest of the population and perhaps even more completely.

Thus it will be seen that in the days of its early origins the future AlsaceLorraine was a part of the future France.

It is true that in the fifth century, at the time of the dissolution of the Roman Empire, barbarians, Alamans or Franks, from beyond the right bank of the Rhine, penetrated into the east of this region; to this day a Germanic dialect is spoken there. But Metz was never touched by this

invasion, which broke itself in vain against its fortifications. The town and a large slice of territory to the east have never spoken German. The French language has also been preserved in Alsace, not only at Belfort and at Delle, which France kept in 1871, but in the valleys of the Vosges as well.

At the time of the Merovingians and the Carolingians, from the fifth to the nineteenth century, the whole region was a part of the Frankish kingdom. Its warriors fought under the orders of Charlemagne beyond the Rhine in those wars by which he subdued Germany.

Then comes an extremely confused epoch when the empire founded by Charlemagne fell into dissolution. His grandchildren divided it amongst themselves in the year 843 by the compact of Verdun. The region of AlsaceLorraine was for a time included in a temporary kingdom established between France and Germany; then it was tossed about between the two countries. In the tenth century it recognized the sovereignty of the German kings. And in this same country the region of Alsace-Lorraine, which had had until then a common destiny, divided in two. Lorraine became a duchy; Alsace became attached to a duchy of the German kingdom-Suabia. It was a badlychosen union, for the Alsatian detests the Suabian, the "Schwob" as he terms him, the word being a gross insult from the lips of an Alsatian.

Here, then, we find the whole region swallowed up by Germany, but the Germany of those days resembled in

no way the Germany of today. Its kings, powerful at the time of the tenth century, had taken the title of Emperor. Their empire rejoiced in the bizarre and boastful appellation of Holy Roman Germanic Empire, for the vanity of Germany is as old as Germany itself. This empire comprised, in addition to Germany, Holland, a part of Belgium, the valleys of the Saone and the Rhone, and a considerable part of Italy. The imperial authority was exceedingly badly accepted in these countries; in Germany itself it waned unceasingly up to the middle of the thirteenth century, when the whole country fell into complete anarchy and broke up into hundreds of separate States, each of them considering itself as the sovereign State.

II-LORRAINE UP TO ITS REUNION

WITH FRANCE.

We must now follow the history of Alsace and Lorraine since their separation up to the time of the reunion with France, beginning with Lorraine.

From the Duchy of Lorraine the three bishoprics of Metz, Toul, and Verdun became detached. The following are the circumstances in which they became French.

In order

In the sixteenth century the Emperor of Germany, Charles the Fifth, more powerful than any of his predecessors, wished to impose his authority on all the German princes. to defend their liberties several of these princes allied themselves with the King of France, Henry the Second, and invited him to occupy Metz, Toul, and Verdun, which were, they said, "French-speaking parts." These towns were accordingly occupied. Charles the Fifth attempted to retake Metz, which he besieged with a great army. But the Duke of Guise, commanding in the name of the King of France, defended the town, and the inhabi

tants assisted him in fortifying it. Beaten, Charles the Fifth fled to Germany. For the second time Metz had withstood a German invasion. It will be asked what became of the Duchy of Lorraine during this time. The Dukes had continued for a certain period to acknowledge the suzerainity of Germany, but from the fourteenth century they began to look towards France. During the Hundred Years' War a number of nobles from Lorraine fought with us against our enemy of those days-the English. In 1542, by the Treaty of Nuremberg, Charles the Fifth recognized the independence of the Duke of Lorraine, who thus ceased to be a vassal of Germany and became an independent sovereign.

From this time, at the Court of the Dukes of Lorraine at Nancy, the capital, and in the whole country, a purely French civilization took root. Now it happened in 1737 that the last Duke, Francis the Third, by one of those curious arrangements which were sometimes made in the eighteenth century, exchanged the birthright of his ancestors for the Duchy of Tuscany and the hope of the Imperial German crown. By his marriage with Marie-Thérèse, daughter of the Emperor Charles the Sixth, who died in 1740 without a male heir, Francis the Third of Lorraine became the Emperor Francis the First. As for the Duchy of Lorraine, it was handed over to the dispossessed King of Poland, Stanislas Lesczinski, whose daughter had married the King of France, Louis the Fifteenth.

Without question, during the course of the seventeenth century, France had more than once used violence against the Duke of Lorraine, who had constituted himself our enemy, but the memory of this died out. The reign of the father-in-law of the King of France in Lorraine was a quiet