boles of the young shade trees! Next day we again left Brussels, the
submissive, and made a much longer excursion under German auspices.
And, at length, after much travail, we landed in the German frontier
city of Aix-la-Chapelle, where I wrote these lines. There it was, two
days after our arrival, that we heard of the fate of Louvain and of that
pale little man, the burgomaster, who had survived his crisis of the
nerves to die of a German bullet.

We wondered what became of the proprietor of the House of the Thousand
Columns; and of the young Dutch tutor in the Berlitz School of
Languages, who had served us as a guide and interpreter; and of the
pretty, gentle little Flemish woman who brought us our meals in her
clean, small restaurant round the corner from the Hotel de Ville; and of
the kindly, red-bearded priest at the Church of Saint Jacques, who gave
us ripe pears and old wine.

I reckon we shall always wonder what became of them, and that we shall
never know. I hoped mightily that the American wing of the big Catholic
seminary had been spared. It had a stone figure of an American Indian--
looking something like Sitting Bull, we thought--over its doors; and
that was the only typically American thing we saw in all Louvain.

When next I saw Louvain the University was gone and the stone Indian was
gone too.




Chapter 5