gerbread or sugar-plums as the penalty for being
surprised in this way.

On New Year's Day in Belgium it is not only your friends who stop you
in the street or call at your house. Every man, woman, boy, or girl
who has done any work for you, and often those who have done nothing,
expect to get something. They are very greedy. Railway-porters who
have once brought a box to your house, ring your bell and beg.
Telegraph-boys, scavengers paid by the town, bell-ringers, policemen,
shop-boys, everyone comes bowing and scraping, and men who in England
would be ashamed to take a "tip" will touch their hats, and hold out
their hands for a few pence. They don't wait to be offered money; they
ask for it, like common street-beggars asking alms.

January 6, the Feast of the Epiphany, is known in Flanders as _Groot
Nieuwjahr_ ("Great New Year"), and is kept to some extent by the
working-people in the same way as the first day of the year. Mondays
are always idle days with working-men in Belgium, and the first Monday
after Epiphany is the idlest of them all. It is called _Verloren
Maandag_, or, in French, _Lundi Perdu_, which means "Lost Monday,"
because no one does any work. The day is spent going about asking for
money, and at night there is a great deal of drinking. On one of these
Mondays not long ago some drunken troopers of a cavalry regiment
stabbed the keeper of a village public-house near Bruges, broke his
furniture to pieces, and kept the villagers in a state of terror for
some hours.

One very bad thing about the lower-class Belgians is that when they
drink, and begin to quarrel, they use knives, and wound or kill those
who have offended them. By a curious superstition it is thought
unlucky to work on Lost Monday, so the people get drunk, and more
crimes of violence are committed on that day than at any other time of
the year.

CHAPTER VIII

PAGEANTS AND PROCESSIONS

The Belgians are very fond of pageants and processions. In each town
there are several, and in all villages at least one, every year. It
has been so for hundreds of years, and these spectacles must have been
magnificent in the Middle Ages, when the narrow streets were full of
knights in glittering armour riding on their strong Flemish war-horses
decked with embroidered saddle-cloths, bishops and priests in gorgeous
vestments, standard-bearers, trumpeters, heralds in their robes of
office, images of saints borne high above the crowd, mingled with