g that is pleasant and care-free is
almost over, and every greeting of a comrade is touched with Vale. It is
the little things that are to be lost, so to the little things the time
remaining is given. It is then one learns that little things are the
dearest, the light-hearted supper in the pleasant cafe with the friend
whose talk satisfies, the walk down street past familiar windows, the
look of roofs and steeples dim in the evening light.

"It's different, isn't it?" said the banker thoughtfully.

"Yes," agreed Hilda; "it isn't much like Chicago."

"Think of destroying places like this!" went on Hinchcliffe. "Why, they
can't rebuild them."

"No," laughed Hilda; "this sort of ancestral thing isn't quite in our
line."

"How foolish of them to go to war!" continued the banker. When his mind
once gripped an idea, it carried it through to the terminal station.
Hilda turned on him vigorously.

"You realize, don't you," she said, "that Belgium didn't bring on this
war? You remember that it was some one else that came pouncing down upon
her. It seems almost a pity, doesn't it, to smash this beauty and hunt
these nice people?"

"It's all wrong," he said; "it's all wrong."

* * * * *

Wetteren Hospital--brick walls and stone floors, the clatter of wooden
shoes in the outer corridor, where peasants shuffled. In two inner
rooms, where eleven cots stood, there was a hush, for there lay the
grievously wounded. Eleven peasants they were, men, women, and a child.
A priest was ministering cheer to them, bed by bed. Four Sisters were
busy and noiseless in service. The priest led Hilda and Hinchcliffe to
the cot of one of the men. The peasant's face was pallid, and the cheeks
sunken from loss of blood. The priest addressed him in Flemish, telling
him these two were friendly visitors, and wished to know what had been
done to him. Quietly and sadly the man in the bed spoke. Sentence by
sentence the priest translated it for Hilda and the banker. On Sunday
morning, the peasant, Leopold de Man, of Number 90 Hovenier Straat,
Alost, was hiding in the house of his sister, in the cellar. The Germans
made a fire of the table and chairs in the upper room. Then catching
sight of Leopold, they struck him with the butt of their guns, and
forced him to pass through the fire. Then, taking him outside, they
struck him to the ground, and gave him a blow over the head with a gun
stock, and a cut of the bayonet whic