me, that
they are less intelligent, less firmly attached to justice, honour and
humanity, less civilized, in a word, than those whom they claimed the
right to enslave in the name of a superiority which they themselves
have proved not to exist; and, unless they can establish that their
errors, perfidies and cruelties, which can no longer be denied, should
be imputed only to those masters, then they themselves must bear the
pitiless weight. I do not know how they will escape from this
predicament, nor what the future will decide, that future which is
wiser than the past, even as, in the words of an old Slav proverb, the
dawn is wiser than the eve. In the meanwhile, let us copy the prudence
of our soldiers, who know what to believe far better than we do.

* * * * *

THE MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS

XXIV

THE MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS

_The Massacre of the Innocents_ appeared for the first time
in 1886, in a little periodical called _La Pleiade_ which
some friends and I had founded in the Latin Quarter and
which died of inanition after its sixth number. My reason
for making room in the present volume for these pages
marking a very modest start--they were the first that found
their way into print--is not that I am under any delusion as
to the merits of this youthful work, in which I had simply
aimed at reproducing as best I could the different episodes
of a picture in the Brussels Museum, painted in the
sixteenth century by Pieter Brueghel the Elder. But it
appeared to me that circumstances had made of this humble
literary effort a sort of prophetic vision; for it is but
too likely that similar scenes must have been repeated in
more than one of our unhappy Flemish or Brabant villages and
that to describe them as they were lately enacted we should
have only to change the name of the butchers and probably,
alas, to accentuate their cruelty, their injustice and their
hideousness!--M. M.

It was close upon supper-time, that Friday the twenty-sixth day of the
month of December, when a little shepherd-lad came into Nazareth,
sobbing bitterly.

Some peasants drinking ale in the Blue Lion opened the shutters to
look into the village orchard and observed the child running over the
snow. They saw that he was Korneliz' boy and cried from the window:

"What's the matter? Get home with yo