philosophy--goodness, happiness, love, supporting each other,
intertwined, rewarding each other. "Let us not think virtue will
crumble, though God Himself seem unjust. Where could the virtue of
man find more everlasting foundation than in the seeming injustice
of God?" Strange that the man who has written these words should
have spent all his school life at a Jesuit college, subjected to its
severe, semi-monastic discipline; compelled, at the end of his stay,
to go, with the rest of his fellows, through the customary period of
"retreat," lasting ten days, when the most eloquent of the fathers
would, one after the other, deliver sermons terrific to boyish
imagination, sermons whose unvarying burden was Hell and the wrath
of God--to be avoided only by becoming a Jesuit priest. Out of the
eighteen boys in the "rhetorique" class, eleven eagerly embraced
this chance of escape from damnation. As for M. Maeterlinck himself-
-fortunately a day-boarder only--one can fancy him wandering home at
night, along the canal banks, in the silence broken only by the
pealing of church bells, brooding over these mysteries ... but how
long a road must the man have travelled who, having been taught the
God of Fra Angelico, himself arrives at the conception of a "God who
sits smiling on a mountain, and to whom our gravest offences are
only as the naughtiness of puppies playing on the hearth-rug."

His environment, no less than his schooling, helped to give a mystic
tinge to his mind. The peasants who dwelt around his father's house
always possessed a peculiar fascination for him; he would watch them
as they sat by their doorway, squatting on their heels, as their
custom is--grave, monotonous, motionless, the smoke from their pipes
almost the sole sign of life. For the Flemish peasant is a strangely
inert creature, his work once done--as languid and lethargic as the
canal that passes by his door. There was one cottage into which the