They preserve the faith of past centuries, undertake pilgrim-ages, respect their _pastoor_, believe in the Devil, in the wizard, in the evil eye, that _jettatura_ of the North. So much the better. These yokels fascinate me. I prefer their poetic traditions, the legends drawled out by an old _pachteresse_ in the evening hours, to the liveliest tale of Voltaire, and their clan-narrowness and religious fanaticism stir me more than the patriotic declamations and the insipid civic rhodomontade of the journalist. Splendid and glorious rebels, these Vendeans of ours; may philosophy and civilization long forget them. When the day of equality, dreamed of by geometric minds, comes, they will disappear also, my superb brutes; hunted down, crushed by invasion, but to the end unyielding to Positivist influences. My brothers, utilitarianism will do away with you, you and your rude remote country! Meanwhile, I who have your hot rebel blood coursing in my veins, I who shall not survive you, am fain to steep my spirit in yours, to be at one with you in all that is rude and savage in you, to stupefy myself at great casks of brown ale at the fairs, with you to raise up my voice when the clouds of incense rise like smoke above your sacred processions, to seat myself in silence beside your smoky hearths or to wander alone across the desolate sand-dunes at the hour when the frogs croak, and when the distraught shepherd, become an incendiary and a lost man, grazes his flock of fire across the heaths.... At the beginning of the June of 1865, I had just reached my eleventh birthday and made my first communion with the Freres de la Misericorde at M----. One morning I was called into the parlor; there I found the father superior and my uncle, who told me that he would take me to Antwerp to see my father. At the idea of this unexpected holiday and the prospect of embracing my kind parent, who had been a widower for five years and to whom I was now everything, I did not notice my uncle's serious looks nor the pitying glances of the monk. We set off. The train did not go fast enough for my liking. However, we arrived at last. To ring the door-bell of the simple little house; to embrace Yana the servant; to submit to the caresses of good Lion, a splendid brown spaniel, to race up-stairs with him four steps at a time, to bound into the familiar bedroom, then two words:--"Father!--George!"--to feel myself lifted up and pressed against his heart; to be devoured with kisses, my lips seeking his in the big fair beard: these actions followed one another rapidly; but transient as they were, they are forever graven on my memory. What a long time the dear man held me in his arms! He looked at me with tender admiration, repeating, "What a big boy you have grown, my Jurgen, my Krapouteki!" and he repeated a whole string of impossible but adorable pet names he had invented for me, and among which he interspersed caresses. It was still early in the morning.