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here, materialized, demoniacal, a flying death, swooping across the dark into your very room. It was like one of those dreams in which you cannot stir from your tracks, and meanwhile "Boom... Tzee-ee-ee-ee !"--is this one meant for you? Already there was a patter of feet in the dark, and people with white bundles on their backs went stumbling by toward the river and the bridge. Motors came honking down from the inner streets, and the quay, which had begun to clear by this time, was again jammed. I threw on some clothes, hurried to the street. A rank smell of kerosene hung in the air; presently a petrol shell burst to the southward, lighting up the sky for an instant like the flare from a blast-furnace, and a few moments later there showed over the roofs the flames of the first fire. Although we could hear the wail of shells flying across their wide parabola both into the town and out from the first ring of forts, few burst in our part of the city that night, and we walked up as far as the cathedral without seeing anything but black and silent streets. Every one in the hotel was up and dressed by this time. Some were for leaving at once; one family, piloted by the comfortable Belgian servants--far cooler than any one else--went to the cellar, some gathered about the grate in the writing-room to watch the night out; the rest of us went back to bed. There wasn't much sleep for any one that night. The bombardment kept on until morning, lulled slightly, as if the enemy might be taking breakfast, then it continued into the, next day. And now the city--a busy city of nearly four hundred thousand people--emptied itself in earnest. Citizens and soldiers, field-guns, motor-trucks, wheelbarrows, dog-carts, hay-ricks, baby-carriages, droves of people on foot, all flowing down to the Scheldt, the ferries, and the bridge. They poured into coal barges, filling the yawning black holes as Africans used to fill slave-ships, into launches and tugs, and along the roads leading down the river and southwestward toward Ostend. One thought with a shudder of what would happen if the Germans dropped a few of their shells into that helpless mob, and it is only fair to remember that they did not, although retreating Belgian soldiers were a part of it, and one of the German aeroplanes, a mere speck against the blue, was looking calmly down overhead. Nor did they touch the cathedral, and their agreement not to shell any of the b
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