sciences began to awake, they drank huge bumpers of alcohol as on the day when military lots were drawn.
Wide-eyed and flushed, dressed in their best, but dishevelled, they would, at first sight, have been taken for those young servants and farm-hands who, on the feast of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, were trundled about from dawn until night in carts covered with flowers and green leaves.
The majority were silent and apathetic, lost in meditation. If, perchance, they were won over by their neighbors' frenzy to bawl out a kermess-song, the "Nous irons au pays des roses," of the Rozenlands of Saint Peter and Paul, or the "Nous arrivons de Tord-le-Cou," of the mardigras Gansrijders, the notes were quickly strangled in their throats, and they fell back into reflection.
Before their journey began, their thoughts were already soaring through the boundless space of cloud and tide to the distant shores where new lands awaited them; or their spirit was travelling back to their native villages, left but the night before, to the slate belfry of the church, whose melancholy voice would never again exhort them to resignation. Oh, those chimes that in former days had awakened a guerilla cavalry to arms against the regicide foreigner, and whose tocsin was no longer sufficiently eloquent to stave off the invasion of Hunger! In memory the already repentant fugitives returned to their precarious heritages, among their little crops, pitifully rotated and won only after a struggle with the wild heather (adorable enemy, so cursed, and already so regretted!); or again, to the banks of the vennes and meers, where they fished with worms while watching their thin cows; or around the scaddes, or bonfires, fighting off the marshy mois-
