sight; and already the inhabitants were locking their doors and dousing
their lights in accordance with an order from a source that was not to
be disobeyed. Nine out of ten houses about the square were now but
black oblongs rising against the gray sky. We had nowhere to go; and yet
if we did not go somewhere, and that pretty soon, the patrols would
undoubtedly take unpleasant cognizance of our presence. Besides, the
searching chill of a Belgian night was making us stiff.

Scouting up a narrow winding alley, one of the party who spoke German
found a courtyard behind a schoolhouse called imposingly L'Ecole Moyenne
de Beaumont, where he obtained permission from a German sergeant to
stable our mare for the night in the aristocratic companionship of a
troop of officers' horses. Through another streak of luck we preempted
a room in the schoolhouse and held it against all comers by right of
squatter sovereignty. There my friends and I slept on the stone floor,
with a scanty amount of hay under us for a bed and our coats for
coverlets. But before we slept we dined.

We dined on hard-boiled eggs and stale cheese--which we had saved from
midday--in a big, bare study hall half full of lancers. They gave us
rye bread and some of the Prince de Caraman-Chimay's wine to go with the
provender we had brought, and they made room for us at the long benches
that ran lengthwise of the room. Afterward one of them--a master
musician, for all his soiled gray uniform and grimed fingers--played a
piano that was in the corner, while all the rest sang.

It was a strange picture they made there. On the wall, on a row of
hooks, still hung the small umbrellas and book-satchels of the pupils.
Presumably at the coming of the Germans they had run home in such a
panic that they left their school-traps behind. There were sums in