[Illustration: THE _HARPALYCE_] Copyright by Boston Photo News Co. The _Harpalyce_ was the first and largest of the ships. She sailed on January 7th, reaching Rotterdam the 23d. On April 10th, while on another voyage, she was torpedoed in the North Sea. She carried a crew of fifty-three men, twenty-six of whom were drowned, among them the captain, whom we knew personally. The work of Madame Vandervelde while she was in this country deserves special mention. She is an English woman, the wife of Emile Vandervelde, the leader of the Socialists in Belgium. He had several times been offered a place in the Cabinet but had refused. When the war broke out, however, feeling that he could be of real service to his country, he became one of the Ministers of State. He came with the Minister of Justice, Monsieur Carton de Wiart, an old friend of ours, and several others, as one of a commission sent to America in the autumn of 1914. Madame Vandervelde followed shortly to make a lecture tour in the United States. We found her a charming and well-educated woman, and a speaker of unusual power. She came to this country in a spirit of splendid patriotism for the sake of helping Belgium. Before the food question became urgent, she asked for money to help the Belgian refugees return to their homes. But this did not seem wise, as we shall see from a report quoted below, so the money that she collected was turned into food. "For example, the towns Waelhem, Malines, Duffel, and Lierre, are reduced practically to ruins and are certainly not in a condition to receive back more than one-third of their ordinary population. There is, moreover, a smell of decay in the air, which probably proceeds from corpses buried in the ruins, which may, at any time, breed a pestilence. To send people back to their homes when those homes no longer exist, I believe to be cruel. Visé and Tamines and, I suppose, ten or a dozen other small towns in Belgium, are practically in the same condition as those I visited, desolate and uninhabitable, half of their houses wrecked, many scattered and isolated farmhouses practically destroyed, and a considerable portion of the land under cultivation laid waste, either by military operations or by inundation for defense. "There is no work. The factories are closed because they have no raw material, coal, or petrol, and because they have no markets. And yet war taxes are falling with hideous pressure upon a people whose hands are empty, whose workshops are closed, whose fields are idle, whose cattle have been taken." In one of her lectures Madame Vandervelde said: "The sight of the poor refugees streaming into Antwerp from Louvain and Malines, women with babies in their arms, older children clinging to their skirts, men wheeling their decrepit fathers in wheelbarrows or helping along a crippled brother or son, is more pitiful than any words can express."