ke through the hedges, and slept in the cornfields, and
ravished the apple-trees in my orchard, and raided the cottagers for tea,
and tramped to and fro in our street and gave us the time of our lives.

"_I_ never seed such a sight in _my_ life," said old Benjamin to me in the
evening. "Man and boy, I've lived in that there bungalow for eighty-five
year come Michaelmas, and _I_ never seed the like o' _this_ before.... Yes,
eighty-five year come Michaelmas. And my father had that there land on a
peppercorn rent, and the way he lost it was like this--"

Happily at this moment there was a sudden alarum among the soldiers, and I
was able to dodge the familiar rehearsal of old Benjamin's grievance.

And who would ever have dreamed that we should live to hear French talked
in our street as a familiar form of speech? But we have. In a little
cottage at the other end of the village is a family of Belgians, a fragment
of the flotsam thrown up by the great inundation of 1914. They have brought
the story of "frightfulness" near to us, for they passed through the terror
of Louvain, hiding in the cellars for nights and days, having two of their
children killed, and escaping to the coast on foot.

Every Sunday night you will see them very busy carrying their few chairs
and tables into a neighbouring barn, for on Monday mornings mass is
celebrated there. The priest comes up in a country cart from ten miles
away, and the refugees scattered for miles around assemble for worship,
after which there is a tremendous pow-pow in French and Flemish, with much
laughter and gaiety.

Old Benjamin "don't hold with they priests," and he has grave suspicions
about all foreign tongues, but the Belgians have become quite a part of us,
and their children are learning to lisp in English down at the school in
the valley.

Much less agreeable is the frame of mind towards the occupants of the
cottage next to the Blue Boar. They are the wife and children of a German
who had worked in this country for many years and is now in America. The
woman is English and amiable, but the proximity of anything so reminiscent
of Germany is painful to the village, and especially to the landlord, whose
views about Germans can hardly be put into words.

"I should hope there'll be no prisoners took after _this_," he says grimly
whenever he hears of a new outrage. "Vermin--that's what they are," he
says, "and they should be treated according-ly."

The Germans, in fact,