There in the Hôtel de Ville, which is quite unharmed, he had his office within reach of the German commander. He yielded to Cæsar and protected his own people day in and day out, diplomatic, watchful, Belgian. And he was cheerful. What other people could have preserved any vestige of it! Sometimes one wondered if it were not partly due to an absence of keen nerve-sensibilities, or to some other of the traits which are a product of the Belgian hothouse and Belgian inheritance. I might tell you about M. Nerincx’s currency system; how he issued paper promises to pay when he gave employment to the idle in repairing those houses which permitted of being repaired and cleaned the streets of _débris_, till ruined Louvain looked as shipshape as ruined Pompeii; and how he got a little real money from Brussels to stop depreciation when the storekeepers came to him and said that they had stacks of his notes which no mercantile concern would cash. M. Nerincx was practising in the life about all that he ever learned and taught at the university, “which we shall rebuild!” he declared, with cheery confidence. “You will help us in America,” he said. “I’m going to America to lecture one of these days about Louvain!” “You have the most famous ruins, unless it is Rheims,” I assured him. “You will get flocks of tourists”--particularly if he fenced in the ruins of the library and burned leaves of ancient books were on sale. “Then you will not only have fed, but have helped to rebuild Belgium,” he added. A shadow of apprehension overhung his anticipation of the day of Belgium’s delivery. Many a Belgian had arms hidden from the alert eye of German espionage, and his bitterness was solaced by the thought: “I’ll have a shot at the Germans when they go!” The lot of the last German soldiers to leave a town, unless the garrison slips away overnight, would hardly make him a good life insurance risk. My last look at a Belgian bread line was at Liége, that town which had had a blaze of fame in August, 1914, and was now almost forgotten. An industrial town, its mines and works were idle. The Germans had removed the machinery for rifle-making, which has become the most valuable kind of machinery in the world next to that for making guns and shells. If skilled Belgians here or elsewhere were called upon to serve the Germans at their craft, they suddenly became butter-fingered. So that bread line at Liége was long, its queue stretching the breadth of the cathedral square.