other or signing treaties which condemned all succeeding
college students to a new feat of memory; you could
almost see their brilliant, shadowless, New World youth
deepened and sobered by a momentary perception of the
Past as a very long and startlingly real phenomenon,
full, scaringly full of real people, entirely like ourselves,
going about the business of getting born, being married
and dying, with as little conscious regard as we for
historical movements and tendencies. They were never
done marveling that the sun should have fallen across
Crouy streets at the same angle before Columbus discov-
ered America as to-day; that at the time of the French
Revolution just as now, the big boys and sturdy men
of Crouy should have left the same fields which now lie
golden in the sun and have gone out to repel the invader;
that people looked up from drawing water at the same
fountain which now sparkles under the sycamore trees
and saw Catherine de Medici pass on her way north as
now they see the gray American Ambulance rattle
by. . . . "And I bet it was over these same cussed hard-
heads!" cried the boy from Ohio, trying vainly to ease
his car over the knobby paving-stones.

"No, oh no," answered the town notary reasonably.
"The streets of Crouy were paved in comparatively re-
cent times, not earlier than 1620."

"Oh, the Pilgrim Fathers!" cried the boy from Con-
necticut.

"And nothing ever happened here all that time?"
queried the boy from California incredulously.

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