become heroic and noble by grace of the defenders of Liege.

Perhaps the bishop's wife received a young woman who smoked
cigarettes, and asked her hostess for rouge, and the publican's wife
received a countess. Mrs. Smith, of Clapham, who had brought up
her children in the strictest propriety, welcomed as play-mates for her
dears, whom she had kept away from the contaminating associations
of the alleys, Belgian children from the toughest quarters of Antwerp,
who had a precocity that led to baffling confusion in Mrs. Smith's mind
between parental responsibility and patriotic duty. Smart society gave
the run of its houses sometimes to gentry who were used to getting
the run of that kind of houses by lifting a window with a jemmy on a
dark night. It was a refugee lottery. When two hosts met one said:
"My Belgian is charming!" and the other said: "Mine isn't. Just listen--"

But the English are game; they are loyal; they bear their burden of
hospitality bravely.

The strange things that happened were not the more agreeable
because of the attitude of some refugees who, when they were
getting better fare than they ever had at home, thought that, as they
had given their "all" for England, they should be getting still better, not
to mention wine on the table in temperance families; whilst there was
a disinclination towards self-support by means of work on the part of
certain heroes by proxy which promised a Belgian occupation of
England that would last as long as the German occupation of
Belgium. England was learning that there are Belgians and Belgians.
She had received not a few of the "and Belgians."

It was only natural. When the German cruisers bombarded