What shall we say of those other homely personages who fill the scene--symbols no less of Flemish character at its finest and of the enduringly domestic springs of Flemish national life? Claes the trusty fatherhood, Soetkin the valiant motherhood of Flanders, Nele her true heart, Lamme Goedzak her great belly that hungers always for more and yet more good things to eat and is never satisfied? Or what, again, of the tragic Katheline, half witch, half martyr, and the centre of that dark intrigue which seems to throb like a shuttle through the mazy pattern of the plot, threading it all into unity? From yet another standpoint: as an envisagement of the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition, de Coster's work is probably without parallel in an already well-tilled field. The sinister figure of the King of Spain broods over it all like a Kaiser, and the episodes of stake and torture are recorded with a realism which might appear exaggerated had not modern Belgium--though in terms of "scientific warfare"--an even more devilish tale to tell. The fact is that de Coster's trick of stating horror and leaving it to make its full effect without a touch of the rhetoric of indignation, proves the deadliest of all corrosive weapons; and it is hardly surprising that the book had been hailed in some quarters as a Protestant tract. But de Coster himself was in no sense a theological partisan, and his sympathy with the Beggarmen sprang from his enthusiasm for national liberty far more than from any bias towards the Protestant cause as such. That Catholicism has ever been identified with tyranny the best Catholic will most deplore, nor will de Coster's "traditional" irreverence blind such a reader's eyes to the spiritual generosity which permeates the whole work, and is, indeed, its most essential characteristic. It remains to add that, in the interests of war-time publishing, the present version represents a curtailment of the Legend as it left the author's hands. Here and there also, to maintain the continuity of incident, the translator has permitted himself some slight modification of the original text. By this means it is hoped that the proportions of the whole have been fairly maintained, and that no vital aspect of plot or atmosphere has been altogether suppressed or allowed an undue prominence. G. A. W. HERE BEGINS THE FIRST BOOK OF THE LEGEND OF THE GLORIOUS JOYOUS AND HEROIC ADVENTURES OF TYL ULENSPIEGEL AND LAMME GOEDZAK IN THE LAND OF FLANDERS AND ELSEWHERE I At Damme, in Flanders, when the May hawthorn was coming into flower, Ulenspiegel was born, the son of Claes. When she had wrapped him in warm swaddling-clothes, Katheline, the midwife, made a careful examination of the infant's head, and found a piece of skin hanging therefrom. "Born with a caul!" she cried out joyfully. "Born under a lucky star!" But a moment later, noticing a small black mole on the baby's shoulder, she fell into lamentation.