er all!

More than once have the village peasants collected, armed with scythes,
hoes and pitchforks, to protect these sacred pictures from vandalism on
the part of lustful collectors or marauding bands of soldiers.

In Eighteen Hundred Fourteen, a detachment of French soldiers killed a
dozen of the villagers, and a priest fell fighting for these treasures on
the sacred threshold, stabbed to his death. Then the vandals tramped over
the dead bodies, entered the church, and cut from its frame Van Dyck's
"Holy Family" and carried the picture off to Paris. But after Napoleon
had gotten his Waterloo (only an hour's horseback ride from Saventhem),
the picture was restored to the villagers on order of the Convention.

Rubens waited expectantly, thinking to have news from his brilliant pupil
in Italy. He waited a month. Two months passed, and still no word. After
three months a citizen reported that the day before he had seen Van Dyck,
aided by a young woman, putting up a picture in the village church at
Saventhem.

Rubens saddled his horse and rode down there. He found Van Dyck and his
lady-love sitting hand in hand on a mossy bank, in a leafy grove,
listening to the song of a titmouse. Rubens did not chide the young man;
he merely took him one side and told him that he had stayed long enough,
and "beyond the Alps lies Italy." He also suggested that Anthony Van Dyck
could not afford to follow the example of his illustrious Roman namesake
who went down into Egypt and found things there so softly luxurious that
he forgot home, friends, country--all! To remain at Saventhem would be
death to his art--he must have before him the example of the masters.

Van Dyck said he would think about it; and Rubens took a look at his old
saddle-horse rolling in the pasture or wading knee-deep in clover, and
rode back home.

In a few days he sent Chevalier Nanni down to the country-seat at
Saventhem, to tell Van Dyck that he was on his way to Italy and that Van
Dyck had better accompany him.

Van Dyck concluded to go. He made tearful promises to his beautiful Anna
that he would return for her in a year.

And so the servant, who had become an expert in the making of Dutch
cheese, caught the horses out of the pasture, and having rebroken them,
the cavalcade started southward in good sooth.

* * * * *

It was four years before Van Dyck returned. He visited Milan, Florence,
Verona, Mantua, Venice and Rome, a