all classes from Antwerp into Holland and England, and then a huge
process of depopulation in Flanders and the Pas de Calais. This flood
came to the eastern and southern parts of England and particularly to
London, and there hastily improvised organisations distributed it to a
number of local committees, each of which took a share of the refugees,
hired and furnished unoccupied houses for the use of the penniless, and
assisted those who had means into comfortable quarters. The Matching's
Easy committee found itself with accommodation for sixty people, and
with a miscellaneous bag of thirty individuals entrusted to its care,
who had been part of the load of a little pirate steam-boat from Ostend.
There were two Flemish peasant families, and the rest were more or less
middle-class refugees from Antwerp. They were brought from the station
to the Tithe barn at Claverings, and there distributed, under the
personal supervision of Lady Homartyn and her agent, among those who
were prepared for their entertainment. There was something like
competition among the would-be hosts; everybody was glad of the chance
of "doing something," and anxious to show these Belgians what England
thought of their plucky little country. Mr. Britling was proud to lead
off a Mr. Van der Pant, a neat little bearded man in a black tail-coat,
a black bowler hat, and a knitted muffler, with a large rucksack and a
conspicuously foreign-looking bicycle, to the hospitalities of Dower
House. Mr. Van der Pant had escaped from Antwerp at the eleventh hour,
he had caught a severe cold and, it would seem, lost his wife and family
in the process; he had much to tell Mr. Britling, and in his zeal to
tell it he did not at once discover that though Mr. Britling knew French
quite well he did not know it very rapidly.

The dinner that night at the Dower House marked a distinct fresh step in
the approach of the Great War to the old habits and securities of
Matching's Easy. The war had indeed filled every one's mind to the