with a quid a month and no ‘ome ner nothing. Wife! Wot ’ave I let myself in for?’ But she was that simple ’earted I couldn’t say no to ’er and I loved her fair to distraction.

“I went back to my ship, but I couldn’t stand it, so at last I gave it up and went to her and we was married in a church and set up ’ousekeeping in a barge!”

A sharp voice from the cabin cut short our colloquy. The skipper jumped as if shot. “Coming, coming,” he called in a very respectful voice, “coming, my dear!”

“It’s——” I left the useless question unfinished. I knew it was the Queen of Sheba, the heroine of the sweets-shop in Flushing, the Mrs. Noah of the barge.

“Yes, it’s my wife. A strong bellus she has, sir: good lungs; and the little shavers has ’em, too.” He pointed to the babies on the deck. “Sea-faring men needs good lungs, you know, sir. But my lads don’t seem to take much to salt water, sir. They prefers canals. They gets sick on the Hollandsch Diep. Can’t make sailor-men o’ them, sir.”

“Sailor-men!” I retorted. “What about that cruiser’s forecastle talk you were giving me, and marrying and settling down? Were you joking with me, skipper? Isn’t love in a barge all it’s cracked up to be?”

“No, sir; yes, sir,” he said, answering both my questions at once but pulling a very sober face. “A man what is a man owes it to hisself to marry and settle down. But a lad, now! that’s another question, sir. I tell you, sir, confidential-like, I’m going to name the next lad after Sir David Beatty!”

“Whew!” I whistled. “And if the lad is a girl?”

“I’ll name her ‘Rule Brittania,’ sir—if my wife agrees.... Coming, coming, my dear; coming,” he called. “Good day, sir; thank you, sir.”

III
THE ODYSSEY OF MR. SOLSLOG

“You-all are in charge of the Relief Commission, suh? I am Mistah Solslog, of Alabama. I’m lookin’ for my sistah.”

The tense blue eyes of my fellow-countryman stared at me searchingly, and I at him. He wore a rubber collar and a false shirt front of a style which afforded popular subjects for caricature twenty-five years ago. His salt-and-pepper suit was cheap, horribly cheap, thin, cotton, summer weight, but immaculate. His hat—an old, well-brushed Stetson—was in his hand. He had no luggage. In the cold winter light of my office in Antwerp his slight, lean features looked prematurely aged, but neither age nor hardship had changed the characteristically even Southern drawl.

“Sit down, Mr. Solslog,” I said. “We’re feeding eleven hundred thousand Belgians here, and clothing and giving work, too, but an American citizen certainly has a claim.”

His face reddened. “Thank you, suh, but it ain’t that sort of help I reequiah, Preehaps you did not understand me. I’m a-lookin’ for my sistah.”

“Yes?”

“She was in Maubeuge when the war broke out.” He pronounced it Maw-booge. “She was a governess, suh. I read in the Atlanta Constitution that war was declared. That was on a Sunday. I quit my job in the lumberyard an’ come straight over here on the old Saint Paul, and I ain’t found her—not yet.”

“But, Mr. Solslog, it’s February now. You left America in August?”

“Yes, suh,” he said gently. “I come in August.”

“Where have you been, then, in the meantime?” I demanded.

“Well, suh, first I went to Maw-booge.”

“The Germans captured Maubeuge on August 27th; they took the fortress on September 6th.”

“Yes, suh. I know they did. I was there. You don’t quite understand me. I was lookin’ for my sistah.”

The man amazed, angered, and puzzled me. Common-sense told me that the Germans allowed no one—least of all a stray American—to wander into Belgium, inside the German lines, on the flimsy excuse of “looking for his sister,” but here was just such a man. Worst of all, he really seemed simple and candid: the more dangerous as a spy, probably, though what he was to spy upon I had not the ghost of an idea.

“Sprechen Sie Deutsch, Herr Solslog? Warum sind Sie hier in Belgien? Sind Sie Spion? Vous parlez Français, n’est-ce pas? Vous êtes espion, oui? ’ut U Veaamsch klappen?” I shot at him rapidly.

He smiled a smile which disarmed my suspicions, a pathetic, whimsical, puzzled smile. “People are always sayin’ things to me I cain’t understand in these here foreign countries. No, suh, I don’t understand any language but plain You-nited States. I can say ‘uh franc, doo franc’—that’s French, you know, suh—and I know ‘Muhsoor’, that’s French for ‘Mistah’ and ‘my sistah.’ I’ll never forget that word.

“It’s like this, suh: I got up almost to Maw-booge—oh, yes, suh, I had a pass. I got up there with the French. Just walked along with ’em; they couldn’t understand me; I couldn’t understand them, but we walked along. Then we got ’most to Maw-booge where my sistah was—red roofs, like all them pretty towns in France—I could see the town, fightin’ everywhere. I was with a battery, what they call swasuntcans. The officer could speak my language.

“‘Go back,’ he says. ‘Go with these refugee people.’ Everybody was runnin’ away—the fields was full of ’em, dirty and tired, but still runnin’. ‘Go to Paris,’ he says.

“‘But I’m lookin’ for my sistah,’ I says.

“‘She’ll most likely be in Paris. Go quick,’ he says.

“We was standin’ in a poppy field, his battery was firing in fours—pop! pop! pop! pop!—like that. A German ae-reoplane come over like a big bee and dropped a bomb. They screamed and run, everybody did, but the bomb busted and nothin’ come out but powdered lime. Then everybody laughed. But in three minutes more the Germans was a-droppin’ shells all over us. That lime was just a marker.

“They hit my officer friend. ‘Git out,’ he says again to me, ‘Git out quick.’ His fingers dug into the poppies, he was hurt so bad; hit in the stomach. Then he kind of smiled once and pulled off a poppy flower and held it up to me. ‘Here’s a red poppy—the blood of France,’ he says. ‘Take it as a souvenir, and git out.’

“They got me, though—the Germans did. I was in Mardeevay” (I have no idea what the name of the town was) “when they come in. After all the fightin’ I’d seen I went to sleep in a church, and along come the Germans. They was massacreein’ the people. They wanted to shoot me, too, but one of ’em understood my lingo and he took me to the gen’ral. ‘So you’re an English spy,’ he says politely. ‘We’ll examine you a little bit, and then we’ll have you shot. Good-day,’ he says. Then they drug me into a little room in the town hall and kep’ me there. But next day come a man who spoke You-nited States; he’d been in Birmingham, Alabama—funny, ain’t it, how they travel?—and he found out I wasn’t no spy.

“Then I went to Paris——”

“You went to Paris from inside the German lines?”

Mr. Solslog smiled his slow, child-like smile. “Yes, suh. It wasn’t hard a-tall. I was captured by the French. You see, suh, it ain’t hard to travel about in the war so long as the fightin’ is goin’ on. Them French peesants was captured by the Germans, then captured by the French, then captured by the