edlewomen
were given work cutting up the worn-outs of grown-ups and making
them over into astonishingly good suits or dresses for youngsters.

"We've really turned the rink into a kind of department store," said the
lady. "Come into our boot department. We had some leather left in
Belgium that the Germans did not requisition, so we bought it and that
gave more Belgians work in the shoe factories. Work, you see, is
what we want to keep our minds off------"

Blue and yellow tickets here, too! Boots for children and thick-set
working-women and watery-eyed old men!

And each was required to leave behind the pair he was wearing.

"Sometimes we can patch up the cast-offs, which means work for the
cobblers," said the captainess of industry. "And who are our clerks?
Why, the people who put on the skates for the patrons of the rink, of
course!"

One could write volumes on this systematic relief work, the
businesslike industry of succouring Belgium by the businesslike
Belgians, with American help. Certainly one cannot leave out those
old men stragglers from Louvain and Bruges and Ghent--venerable
children with no offspring to give them paternal care--who took their
turn in getting bread, which they soaked thoroughly in their soup for
reasons that would be no military secret, not even in the military zone.
On Christmas Day an American, himself a smoker, thinking what
class of children he could make happiest on a limited purse,
remembered the ring around the stove and bought a basket of cheap
brier pipes and tobacco. By Christmas night some toothless gums
were sore, but a beatific smile of satiation played in white beards.

Nor can one leave out the very young babies at home, who get their
milk if grown people do not, and the older babies beyond milk but not
yet old enough for bread and meat, whose mothers return from the
bread-line to bring their children to another line, where they got
portions of a syrupy mixture which those who know say is the right
provender. On such occasions men are quite helpless. They can only
look on with a frog in the throat at pale, improperly nourished mothers
with bundles of potential manhood and womanhood in their arms. For
this was woman's work for woman. Belgian women of every class
joined in it: the competent wife of a workman, or the wife of a
millionaire who had to walk like everybody else now that her motor-
car was requisitioned by the army.

Pop-eyed children, ruddy-cheeked, aggressi