us apart. From a high balcony an Italian who had been a prisoner of war sang "La Marseillaise," and though these people's ears had been dinned with it all day, though their throats were hoarse with singing it, they listened to it now, again, as though it were a new revelation. The man sang with passion in his voice, as powerful as a trumpet, more thrilling than that. The passion of four years' agony in some foul prison-camp inspired him now, as he sang that song of liberty and triumph.
"Allons, Enfants de la patrie!
Le jour de gloire est arrivé!"
The crowd took up the song again, and it roared across the square of Verviers until another kind of music met, and clashed with it, and overwhelmed it with brazen notes. It was the Town-Band of Verviers, composed of twenty-five citizens, mostly middle-aged and portly—some old and scraggy, in long frock-coats and tall pot-hats. Solemnly, with puffed cheeks, they marched along, parting the waves of people as they went, as it seemed, by the power of their blasts. They were playing an old tune called Madelon—its refrain comes back to me now with the picture of that Carnival in Verviers, with all those faces, all that human pressure and emotion,—and behind them, as though following the Pied Piper (twenty-five Pied Pipers!) came dancing at least a thousand people, eight abreast, with linked arms, or linked hands. They were young Belgian boys and girls, old Belgian men and women, children, British soldiers, American soldiers, English, Scottish, Irish, Canadian, Australian, Russian, and Italian ex-prisoners of war, just liberated from their prison-camps, new to liberty. They were all singing that old song of "Madelon," and all dancing in a kind of jig. Other crowds dancing and singing came out of side-streets into the wide Grande Place, mingled,
