Henry was putting the finishing touches to his canvas, and he begged us to wait, not to breathe.-Page 483. I "Work-do you mean portraits? wish, honey, you'd stop harping on portraits. So long as I'm bringing home the bacon "It won't last-it's bound to break." "It won't break . . . unless I lose Kuan-yin. By George, she is lucky; call it superstition, but there's something in the way she smiles down. . . .” Eve herself failed to scoff at Kuan-yin's powers; she looked up at the porcelain goddess with a glint of fear and with that measuring consideration with which one challenges an equal. The catastrophe follows quickly. The next day was a day of triumph, marked by the cashing of the check for fifteen hundred francs and a debouch into chintz curtains, batik blouses, and practical hardware. It was the tip-over of the wave, the last high fling of the spray from the crest. On Saturday afternoon Henry, much shaken, flung into my room and blurted: "She's gone!" "Who? Eve?" I asked hopefully. Eve, questioned, knew absolutely nothing beyond the fact that she had left the door open for five minutes while she ran across to the corner pâtisserie. I called upon M. Lepetit and felt him out; I even forced my way into his room in his absence and searched, but with no result. I felt certain that M. Lepetit was the thief, but I had no evidence on him. Henry protested that it was nothing, that he would shortly be in a position to buy a dozen Kuan-yins. But he was not steady in his faith; and when he accidentally smashed Eve's jam jar and twice cut himself with his safety-razor, he was sure that his luck had turned. There is no use to prolong it. I watched him smearing canvases, but he worked too hard over those smears, he had no conviction for them. "I told him it was 'A Cloud,' shrugged Henry after Beer's visit, "and he said it looked, veritably, like ‘A Disease' to him. It's no go, Sliver." 'But why didn't you name it 'Disease'? Why didn't you give him the suggestion, and why didn't you give him port? You're breaking, old kid; you've got to keep your nerve. But Henry broke. In the end, he painted the button-maker's solid daughter; he put in solid hours on the portrait, and received a solid sum for it. Some years later I had a small piece of luck, and I moved back into the old room which Henry and I had shared before Eve came between us, on the very day on which Henry arrived in Paris from his New York studio. Henry has progressed. He is one of the greater portraitpainters who dare to paint the truth. His imagination helps him to catch the spirit of that truth. He did the little. Grosvenor boy on his mother's lap just at the age when he had almost outgrown a mother's lap, and the awkwardness was wistful and lovely. He has been exhibited and has taken prizes everywhere, and he covers a page in "Who's Who," and it is not an exaggeration to say that America is proud of him. He was at present on his way to Amsterdam, with a commission to paint the Queen of the Netherlands. I had been out collecting a supper, and I met Henry at my own doorstep, just as he dropped from the auto-taxi. We went up together, and I told Henry about my idea for a Sunday column in the New York and it seemed that we had never been apart. , "But luck," he sighed, looking out over the chimneys at the new moon in a night Monkey-Meat BY JOHN W. THOMASON, JR. Captain, U. S. Marine Corps, U. S. S. Rochester; Author of "Fix Bayonets!" and ILLUSTRATIONS BY THE AUTHOR [At various times and places in 1918 the Second American Division was subsisted on the French ration, a component part of which was preserved Argentine beef with carrots in it. This was called monkey-meat by the marines of the Fourth Brigade. Men ate it when they were very hungry.] ... Na mangled place sand. His face was pale and somewhat called the Wood troubled, and his week's beard was stragNorthwest of Lucy-le- gling and unwholesome. He was not an Bocage two lieuten- out-of-doors man-and he was battalion ants of the marine scout officer. A gentleman over-sensitive brigade squatted by a for the rude business of war, he would conhole the size of a coffin tinue to function until he broke-and one and regarded with at- sensed that he would suffer while about tention certain cooking operations. The it. older, and perhaps the dirtier of the two, was intent upon a fire-blackened mess-kit, which was balanced on two stones and two German bayonets over a can of solidified alcohol. In the mess-kit was simmering a grayish and unattractive matter with doubtful yellowish lumps, into which the lieutenant fed, discriminatingly, bits of hard bread and frayed tomatoes from a can. "Do what you will with it," he observed, "monkey-meat is monkey-meat. It's a great pity that damn Tompkins had to get himself bumped off last night when we came out. He had a way with monkey-meat, the kid did-hell! I never have any luck with orderlies!" He prodded the mess of Argentine beef-the French army's canned meat ration-and stared sombrely. His eyes, a little blood-shot in his sunburned, unshaven face, were sleepy. The other waited on two canteen cups stilted precariously over a pale lavender flame. The water in them began to boil, and he supplied coffee-the coarse-ground pale coffee of the Frogs-with a spoon that shook a little. He considered: "S'pose I'd better boil the sugar in with it," he decided. "There isn't so much of it, you know. We'll taste it more." And he added the contents of a little muslin sack-heavy beet sugar that looked like "I don't like monkey-meat. Before this smell"-he waved his spoon petulantly-"got into my nose I never could eat it. But now you can't smell but one thing, and, after all, you've got to eat." The smell he referred to lay through the wood like a tangible fog that one could feel against the cheek and see. It was the nub-end of June, and many battalions of fighting men had lain in the Wood Northwest of Lucy, going up to the front a little way forward or coming out to stand by in support. It was a lovely place for supports; you could gather here and debouch toward any part of the sector, from Hill 142, on the left, through the Bois de Belleau and Bouresches, to Vaux, where the infantry brigade took on. Many men had lain in the wood, and many men lay in it still. Some of these were buried very casually. Others, in hidden tangles of it, along its approaches, and in the trampled areas beyond it where attack and counterattack had broken for nearly a month of days and nights, hadn't been buried at all. And always there were more, and the June sun grew hotter as it made toward July. Troops lay in the wood now; a battalion of the Sixth and two companies of a Fifth Regiment outfit, half of which was still in line on the flank of the Bois de |