ising higher around me. I
raised my eyes and saw that the Belgian Consul was addressing the
meeting. He was a stout little man, with eye-glasses and a face of no
importance, but it was quite obvious at once that he was most terribly
in earnest. Because he did not know the Russian language he was under
the unhappy necessity of having a translator, a thin and amiable
Russian, who suffered from short sight and a nervous stammer.

He could not therefore have spoken under heavier disadvantages, and my
heart ached for him. It need not have done so. He started in a low
voice, and they shouted to him to speak up. At the end of his first
paragraph the amiable Russian began his translation, sticking his nose
into the paper, losing the place and stuttering over his sentences.
There was a restless movement in the hall, and the poor Belgian Consul
seemed lost. He was made, however, of no mean stuff. Before the Russian
had finished his translation the little man had begun again. This time
he had stepped forward, waving his glasses and his head and his hand,
bending forward and backward, his voice rising and rising. At the end of
his next paragraph he paused and, because the Russian was slow and
stammering once again, went forward on ids own account. Soon he forgot
himself, his audience, his translator, everything except his own dear
Belgium. His voice rose and rose; he pleaded with a marvellous rhythm of
eloquence her history, her fate, her shameful devastation. He appealed
on behalf of her murdered children, her ravished women, her slaughtered
men.

He appealed on behalf of her Arts, her Cathedrals, and libraries ruined,
her towns plundered. He told a story, very quietly, of an old
grandfather and grandmother murdered and their daughter ravished before
the eyes of her tiny children. Here he himself began to shed tears. He
tried to brush them back. He paused and wiped his eyes.... Finally,
breaking down altogether, he turned away and hid his face....

I do not suppose that there were more than a dozen persons in that hall
who understood anything of the language in which he spoke. Certainly it
was the merest gibberish to that whole army of listening men.
Nevertheless, with every word that he uttered the emotion grew tenser.
Cries--little sharp cries like the bark of a puppy--broke out here and
there. "_Verrno! Verrno! Verrno_! (True! True! True!)" Movements, like
the swift finger of the wind on the sea, hovered, wavered, and
vanish