cupation. There was one
small square where goats and geese might have been pastured. It looked
as though weeks might have passed since wagon wheels had rolled over
those stones; and the town folks whose houses fronted on the little
square lounged in their doorways, with idle hands thrust into their
pockets, regarding us with lackluster, indifferent eyes. It may have
been fancy, but I thought nearly all of them looked griped of frame and
that their faces seemed drawn. Seeing them so, you would have said that,
with them, nothing mattered any more.

We saw a good many people, though, who were taking for the moment an
acute and uneasy interest in their own affairs, at the big city prison,
where we spent half an hour or so. Here, in a high-walled courtyard, we
found upward of two hundred offenders against small civic regulations,
serving sentences ranging in length from seven days to thirty. Perhaps
one in three was a German soldier, and probably one in ten was a woman
or a girl; the rest were male citizens of all ages, sizes and social
grading, a few Congo negroes being mixed in. Most of the time they
stayed in their cells, in solitary confinement; but on certain
afternoons they might take the air and see visitors in the bleak and
barren inclosure where they were now herded together.

By common rumor in Brussels the Germans were shooting all persons caught
secretly peddling copies of French or English papers or unauthorized and
clandestine Belgian papers; since only orthodox German papers were
permitted to be sold. The Germans themselves took no steps to deny
these stories, but in the prison we found a large collection of forlorn
newsdealers. Having been captured with the forbidden wares in their
possession, they had mysteriously vanished from the ken of their
friends; but they had not been "put against the wall," as they say in
Europe. They had been given fourteen days apiece, with a promise of six
months if they transgressed a second time.

One little man, with the longest and sleekest and silkiest black
whiskers I have seen in many a day, recognized us as Americans and drew
near to tell us his troubles in a confidential whisper. By his bleached
indoor complexion and his manners anyone would have known him for a
pastry cook or a hairdresser. A hairdresser he was; and in a better day
than this, not far remote, had conducted a fashionable establishment on
a fashionable boulevard.

"Ah, I am in one very sad sta