The Century Volume 100 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1920 edition. Excerpt: ...scheme, perhaps I told you, was to interest Americans in French people of the same profession ruined by the war. It is a striking idea, and had an instant success. Scores of American engineers, architects, lawyers, doctors, for instance, have pledged themselves to pay for the education of the children of French engineers, architects, lawyers, doctors killed in the war. The purpose is to make this pledge the basis of a real friendship between an American family and a French family by constant interchange of letters, photographs, reports showing the progress of the children, and so on. The Mygatts worked on this idea for over two years in Paris. When they came back to this country last year and went down to Southampton for the summer, they soon had interested virtually every family in Southampton in a family of corresponding station in France. The Southampton butcher sent money to buy a pig for the ruined butcher in Misery. Imagine his satisfaction when he received a photograph of the Misery butcher standing happily beside his new pig and her litter. No wonder the other butchers in town pricked up their ears. They wrote to the Misery butcher and sent him one thing and another, and finally said they did n't see why they should n't rebuild that butcher's house and set him up in business again. Every time the Mygatts went down town the butcher who had sent money for the pig had some new question to ask. Once it was whether they did n't think he might be descended from French ancestry. (His name is very Irish.) Once it was to know the fare to France. And now he 's sailing In this way it has come about that Misery finds itself adopted by Southampton, not wholesale and impersonally, but every man, woman, and child in it has become a household...