ed that the rate was scarcely high enough; and also, since her
regular patrons had been driven away at the beginning of the war, he
advised us that sizable tips on our leaving would probably be
appreciated.

Next morning we rose from a breakfast--the meat part of it having been
furnished from the German commissary--to find twenty lancers exercising
their horses in a lovely little natural arena, walled by hills, just
below the small eminence whereon the house stood. It was like a scene
from a Wild West exhibition at home, except that these German horsemen
lacked the dash of our cowpunchers. Watching the show from a back
garden, we stood waist deep in flowers, and the captain's orderly, when
he came to tell us our automobile was ready, had a huge peony stuck in a
buttonhole of his blouse. I caught a peep at another soldier, who was
flirting with a personable Flemish scullery maid behind the protection
of the kitchen wall. The proprietress and her daughters stood at the
door to wave us good-by and to wish us, with apparent sincerity, a safe
journey down into France, and a safe return.

To drop from this cozy, peaceful place into the town of Dinant again was
to drop from a small earthly paradise into a small earthly hell.
Somewhere near the middle of the little perdition our cavalry captain
pointed to a shell of a house.

"A fortnight ago," he told us, "we found a French soldier in that house
--or under it, rather. He had been there four weeks, hiding in the
basement. He took some food with him or found some there; at any rate,
he managed to live four weeks. He was blind, and nearly deaf, too, when
we found out where he was and dug him out--but he is still alive."

One of us said we should like to have a look at a man who had undergone
such an entombment.

"No, you wouldn't," said the captain; "for he is no very pleasant sight.
He is a slobbering idiot."

In the Grand Place, near the shell-riddled Church of Notre Dame--built
by the Bishops in the thirteenth century, restored by the Belgian
Government in the nineteenth, and destroyed by the German guns in the
twentieth--a long queue of women wound past the doorway of a building
where German noncommissioned officers handed out to each applicant a big
loaf of black soldier bread.

"Oh, yes; we feed the poor devils," the German commandant, an elderly,
scholarly looking man of the rank of major, said to us when he had come
up to be introduced. "When our troops en