may take any time from seven to twenty minutes. First, yards and yards of gauze must be folded into squares and cut to regulation size. Then the sheets of cotton wool must be torn and split to a fine web, and the web must be teazed out to the fineness of feathers, snowflakes, thistledown, then gathered up and patted into a ball so light that a breath will blow it away; the ball must be placed on the very centre of the gauze square, the corners of the square taken up crosswise and made fast, the first pair in a single tie that compresses the puff-ball into a cocoon, the second pair gathered together in the centre and secured by a sailor knot; the cocoon is then squeezed back into a ball, a ball that, to be properly absorbent, must have the right degrees of resistance and elasticity and no other. Then, and not till then, you have a surgical swab that is as good or better than any sponge.

Packed by tens in a muslin bag, these swabs go straight from the workrooms into the sterilizers. Nobody is allowed to bring as much as one needle into the workroom, lest it should get into a swab, and thus into a wound. The guarded and perfect thing, that has taken so much time and labor to produce, has a working life of about one second. It may travel hundreds of miles to dab a wound once and be thrown away. For this brief purpose seven thousand will be sent from the depot in a week.

You might think that bandages were a simpler matter. But no; when the stuff is measured out, when two of the nun-like ladies have risen up and engaged with furious energy in the tugof-war that tears it into strips, each strip must be plucked for the loose threads at either edge, then rolled three times over, first by hand, then on a wooden machine that winds it tight, finally on a metal machine that screws it up to the extreme pitch of perfect tightness. Or so it was until the other day when the head of one of the bandage rooms invented a machine that does away with the clumsy hand-rolling altogether. The stuff is passed on to the bar that rolls it between two V-shaped wooden flaps that hold it absolutely straight and

on the stretch, their tension being regulated by two light spring clamps. You keep the V in the middle of your strip; you turn the handle of the bar; and in a few seconds your bandage is ready for the final rolling. And the thing fascinates you; it tempts you to work overtime; you turn and turn the handle in an ecstasy of increasing speed; you are torn from it reluctantly, and go home dreaming of tomorrow, when you will get back to it. Thanks to its inventor, the depot can now turn out more bandages in a few minutes than it could formerly in half an hour.

And in the carpenters' workshops the hundred are making all sorts of hospital furniture, bed rests and bed tables and cradles and trays and trolleys; and splints, some carved delicately to the shape of a leg or arm-the last word in splints and crutches, hundreds of crutches. One head of the carpenters' rooms is a barrister, who in his holiday moments will make exquisite jewelry or build a canoe (he would no doubt build a 200-ton schooner if you gave him holidays enough); now, at the War Hospital Depot, "his swift and fair creations issue like worlds from an archangel's hands." The whole band of war carpenters are working as if their lives depended on it. They are at it on Saturday afternoons and on Sundays; they are given over to it with an austere and sacred passion, as if it were golf.

At 20 Kensington Court, another army of women volunteers are turning out hospital garments-shirts, pajamas, pneumonia jackets-and sheets and pillow slips and sandbags-not for the trenches but for the beds. These, made of strong linen or fine canvas, serve to keep at rest a wounded hand or foot or limb when splints are not needed. The two top floors are given up to the slipper makers.

of the cuttings squares that the surgeons can wipe their instruments on and throw away. The very ends snipped from the swabs and the loose threads from the bandages are gathered up and saved to stuff pillows with. The German Government could not practice a profounder thoroughness, a more inexorable thrift.

These things go to the Dardanelles, to British East Africa, to Serbia, to France, and Belgium, and all over the United Kingdom by hundreds and by thousands, and the hospitals are asking for more and more.

And eight months ago there was not any depot. Barely eight months ago it began with four persons and three fivepound notes. Then, by some miracle, it grew. And the romance of that miracle would be enough, if Kensington Square had no little ghost in her powder closet to work it. Still, we must not leave too much to the supernatural. A volunteer supply depot is always in need of helphelp in money, in material, in volunteers. This is not an appeal; but it is a broad hint.

of Venice

IN

'N belligerent Venice, that reinforces her airy arches, her delicate triforae, with rough walls of bricks, cement,

and beams; in the Venice which has transformed her hotels, formerly sacred to leisure and love, into hospitals full of bleeding heroes; in the dark and silent Venice, whose soul is in intense expectation of the roar of the far-away guns; in courageous and determined Venice, which hourly awaits the apparition in the sky, where there still linger Tiepolo's and Veronese's soft clouds, of winged death-bearing craft; in the Venice of the greater Italy, the Land of Abraham Lincoln has today an extraordinary representative and admirable witness, whose mission has assumed unexpected importance.

American

This representative is an woman, who has consecrated herself to our Saint Francis of Assisi. I like to think of her as one of those saints who bear in the palm of their open hand either a tower or a church or a palace. She was sent to Venice many years ago to execute miniature plaster copies of the most artistic buildings. If the stupid Austrian ferocity should ruin one of St. Mark's domes, a wing of the Procuratie, a lodge of the Ducal Palace, a nave of SS. John and Paul's Church, the choir of the Frari, or the gentle miracle of the Ca' d'Oro, there will remain a souvenir of the beautiful things destroyed in the plaster models of the patient artificeress.

The Venetian knows her well under the name which I myself bestowed on her years ago, the Franciscan sister of the Giudecca. The Ca' Frollo, where she resides, is a yellow structure overlooking a large garden bordering on the Lagoon. A steep oak stairway leads up to the living room. Above the entrance there is an iron shield, with ornamental edges closely resembling a frying pan, which in

ancient times was used to dish out polenta. It is Miss Clara's coat-of-arms.

She comes and meets me smiling on the threshold. On her face a smile multiplies as a ray of sun on a rippled water surface. I have the immediate and strong impression of finding myself before that strange phenomenon represented by a person truly full of life. She wears a bluish cassock, like an artificer. Her hair is white, of the brightest silver, raised on the forehead and thrown back. The eyes are sky blue, shining, innocent, infantine, and in them the internal emotions ebb constantly like flowing water. She has the strong, rough hand of the working

woman.

Her attic is very large. The massive beams fastened with iron are as numerous as the trunks of a forest, moth-eaten, with all their fibres exposed, of a golden brown color. Along the walls plaster casts of architectonic details are disposed: capitals, arches, tailpieces, cornices, bas reliefs. There is a complete fireplace by Lombardo, the very fireplace of the Ducal Palace. There are Madonnas, busts and masks. Suspended on two ropes is a model of an ancient Venetian galley, a hull of which the lines are most beautiful.

"I rescued it at Chioggia with a few cents from a fisherman who was in the act of burning it to cook his polenta," Miss Clara told me.

On one side the windows look out on the Giudecca Canal, which shows the Ducal Palace, the Piazzetta, the library, and the anchored ships, and on the other they look into the garden and the Lagoon. At intervals a rumbling is heard in the distance. Miss Clara sits by the window.

"With the hands of a saint, with religious hands," I tell her, " you have copied the most beautiful churches and palaces of Venice. Now these beautiful things

are threatened, are in danger. We expect to see them in ruin any day. There will at least live the copies that you have sent beyond the sea."

Her blue eyes suddenly fill with tears and the horror of war, the horror of blind destruction, draw all the lines of her face.

"My God, my God!" she murmurs, joining her hands. "Will you allow

such a crime? "

"What does it matter," I venture to say, "if the old stones perish, so long as the soul of Italy is saved and renewed?"

She stares at me intently with profound sadness, shaking her white head, over which there plays the purest light of sunset.

"Have you seen the blinded Ducal Palace?" she asks me, meaning the lodges which the curators have had immured.

We have before us the plaster model of the Palace, on which she has been working for several years. With infinite care she has modeled every arch, every column, every capital, every smallest detail. Her work is an enormous toy, built for an infant nation. She removes the roof and bends to look into it, resembling in the proportions the image of a gigantic saint in the act of guarding a refuge which she protects. Nobody knows better than she the structure of the edifice which incloses the blackened paradise. In my presence she dismounts the copy piece by piece, organ by organ; almost, I would say, limb by limb, even as an anatomist would do with the parts composing the human body in order to learn to know their number, their form, their location, and their relation to each other.

As the shadows begin to invade the attic, she lights an old brass lamp with four arms. The wicks crackle, diffusing a smell of olive oil, which mixes with that of the wax. In the attic the prints of the many matrices pile up, and it seems to be as if an impalpable sentiment of vigor rises from the concave matrices whence the copies of the beautiful things emerge.

Miss Clara works there together with a few workmen, who also compose her simple family. She eats with them the

polenta, at the same table. She takes me by the hand and leads me into her kitchen, where there is a single hearth, with a rack full of common but decorated dishes. Truly there breathes the spirit of St. Francis. She is a kind of nun in freedom who has passed from contemplation to action. Before all those beams I think of the worn-out, splintered wood of the Santa Chiara choir. Before the ears of corn which I see in a rustic vase my mind goes to the cluster of brown ears which I saw at the top of the reading desk in the choir of St. Bernardino of Siena.

"I am very poor," she tells me.

Whole treasures of goodness, indulgence, and love shine at the bottom of the flowing waters of her blue eyes. There is in the structure of her head something virile, and at the same time tender, something intrepid and meek. As the lines of her face seem rays, so her work, her solitude, her poverty are transfigured into divine happiness.

"I am very poor," she says, and she shows me her naked hands, strong and pure, the only source of her daily wealth. I know she distributes all her earnings; I know that on more than one occasion she suffered hunger and cold. Today she had not even a bag of plaster for her work. Sitting by the window, she talks to me of her perennial joy, of the joy of working from dawn to sunset. Slowly the garden grows dark in the dusk. Night begins to fall on the Venice that no longer lights her lamps, not even the lamps before the Virgins watching over the deserted canals. The nocturnal horror of war begins to expand on the Lagoon. In the distance a rumbling is heard coming, perhaps from Aquilega or Grado, where they are fighting for redemption. The vast attic illuminated by the four-armed lamp becomes alive with shadows and quiverings.

Sitting by the window, simple, candid, sweet, she searches my innermost soul, then she observes my hands, too white, and my nails, too polished, and, lo! poverty appears to me as the nakedness of force, as the sincerest and most noble statue of life.

"I also work," I tell her, as if ashamed of hands too white and my nails too pol