business. Stocks were small and bravely displayed. Only the rich
could afford such luxuries, which in ordinary times were what ice-
cream cones are to us. Even the jewellery shops were open, with
diamond rings flashing in the windows.

"You must pay rent; you don't want to discharge your employees,"
said a jeweller. "There is no place to go except your shop. If you
closed it would look as if you were afraid of the Germans. It would
make you blue and the people in the street blue. One tries to go
through the motions of normal existence, anyway. But, of course, you
don't sell anything. This week I have repaired a locket which carried
the portrait of a soldier at the front and I've put a mainspring in a
watch. I'll warrant that is more than some of my competitors have
done."

Swing around the circle in Brussels of a winter's morning and look at
the only crowds that the Germans allow to gather, and any doubt that
Belgium would have gone hungry if she had not received provisions
from the outside was dispelled. Whenever I think of a bread-line
again I shall see the faces of a Belgian bread-line. They blot out the
memory of those at home, where men are free to go and come;
where war has not robbed the thrifty of food.

It was fitting that the great central soup kitchen should be established
in the central express office of the city. For in Belgium these days
there is no express business except in German troops to the front
and wounded to the rear. The dispatch of parcels is stopped, no less
than the other channels of trade, in a country where trade was so rife,
a country that lived by trade. On the stone floor, where once
packages were arranged for forwarding to the towns whose names are
on the walls, were many great cauldrons in clusters of three, to economize
space and fuel.

"We don't lack cooks," said a chef-who had been in a leading hotel.
"So many of us are out of work. Our society of hotel and restaurant
keepers took charge. We know the practical side of the business. I
suppose you have the same kind of a society in New York and would
turn to it for help if the Germans occupied New York?"

He gave me a printed report in which I read, for example, that "M.
Arndt, professor of the Ecole Normale, had been good enough to
take charge of accounts," and "M. Catteau had been specially
appointed to look after the distribution of bread." Most appetizing that
soup prepared under direction of the best chefs in the city! The