as fast as we loaded it with ham and eggs and plum jam; and when he had
eaten enough for three and could hold no more he went to sleep, with his
tousled head among the dishes.

The father between bites told us his tale--such a tale as we had heard
dozens of times already and were to hear again a hundred times before
that crowded week ended--he telling it with rolling eyes and lifting
brows, and graphic and abundant gestures. Behind him and us, penning
our table about with a living hedge, stood the leading burghers of
Nivelles, now listening to him, now watching us with curious eyes. And,
as he talked on, the landlord dimmed the oil lamps and made fast the
door; for this town, being in German hands, was under martial law and
must lock and bar itself in at eight o'clock each night. So we sat in a
half light and listened.

They lived, the two Putzeys, at a hamlet named Marchienne-au-Pont, to
the southward. The Germans had come into it the day before at sunup, and
finding the French there had opened fire. From the houses the French
had replied until driven out by heavy odds, and then they ran across the
fields, leaving many dead and wounded behind them. As for the
inhabitants they had, during the fighting, hidden in their cellars.

"When the French were gone the Germans drove us out," went on the
narrator; "and, of the men, they made several of us march ahead of them
down the road into the next village, we holding up our hands and loudly
begging those within the houses not to fire, for fear of killing us who
were their friends and neighbors. When this town surrendered the
Germans let us go, but first one of them gave me a cake of chocolate.

"Yet when I tried to go to aid a wounded Frenchman who lay in the