carpet slippers, told us the burgomaster was ill in bed at home.

"He suffers," explained our landlord in French, "from a crisis of the
nerves." The French language is an expressive language.

Then, coming a pace nearer, our landlord added a question in a cautious
whisper.

"Messieurs," he asked, "do you think it can be true, as my neighbors
tell me, that the United States President has ordered the Germans to get
out of our country?"

We shook our heads, and he went silently away in his carpet slippers;
and his broad Flemish face gave no hint of what corrosive thoughts he
may have had in his heart.

It was Wednesday morning when we entered Louvain. It was Saturday
morning when we left it. This last undertaking was preceded by
difficulties. As a preliminary to it we visited in turn all the stables
in Louvain where ordinarily horses and wheeled vehicles could be had for
hire.

Perhaps there were no horses left in the stalls--thanks to either
Belgian foragers or to German--or, if there were horses, no driver would
risk his hide on the open road among the German pack trains and rear
guards. At length we did find a tall, red-haired Walloon who said he
would go anywhere on earth, and provide a team for the going, if we paid
the price he asked. We paid it in advance, in case anything should
happen on the way, and he took us in a venerable open carriage behind
two crow-bait skeletons that had once, in a happier day when hay was
cheaper, been horses.

We drove slowly, taking the middle of the wide Brussels road. On our
right, traveling in the same direction, crawled an unending line of
German baggage wagons and pontoon trucks. On our left, going the
opposite way, was another line, also unending, made up of refugee
villagers, returning afoot to the towns beyond Louvain from which they
had fled four days earlier. They were footsore and they limped; they
were of all ages and most miserable-looking. And, one and all, they
were as tongueless as so many ghosts. Thus we traveled; and at the end
of the first hour came to the tiny town of Leefdael.

At Leefdael there must have been fighting, for some of the houses were
gutted by shells. At least two had been burned; and a big tin sign at a
railroad crossing had become a tin colander where flying lead had sieved
it. In a beet patch beside one of the houses was a mound of fresh earth
the length of a long man, with a cross of sticks at the head of it. A
Belgian soldie