To brightening up the flames of Hell and putting new tail on the Devil, mending his left hoof and doing several odd jobs for the damned 7.17 To rebordering the robes of Herod and adjusting his wig 4.00 To taking the spots off the son of Tobias 1.30 To cleaning Balaam's Ass and putting new shoe on him 1.70 To putting rings in Sarah's ears 1.71 To putting new stone in David's sling and enlarging the head of Goliath and extending Saul's legs 6.13 To decorating Noah's Ark and putting head on Shem 4.31 To mending the shirt of the Prodigal Son and cleaning his ear 3.39 $60.45 Belgium has lost none of her interest in artistic expression. At the Academy in Antwerp, there were about two thousand art students before the war, and about sixteen thousand in all Belgium. Perhaps the most noted living painters at that time were Stevens and Wauters, and Madame Ronner, who was famous for her pictures of cats. The studio of Blanc-Grin, in Brussels, was the center of present-day painters when we were there. Belgium has never been so famous for its sculptors as for its painters. Among the moderns, Jef Lambeaux took high rank, but Constantin Meunier, of Liège, was perhaps the greatest. "He was _par excellence_," says Max Rooses, "the sculptor of the workman: first of the Hainault coal-miner, then of the worker of all trades and countries.... He finally arrived at investing his models with truly classic beauty. They became the heroes of a grand drama, now commanding the flames of tall furnaces and measuring their strength with the most terrible of the elements, now cutting the corn and tying it in sheaves, defying the almost equally murderous heat of the sun." In a notice of the Royal Academy Exhibition in London, in May of the present year, we read, "Almost the only work universally praised in the press reviews of the opening day is by a Belgian sculptor, Egide Rombeaux. It is a statue of more than life size, entitled 'Premier Morning.'" One critic says, that outside the charmed circle where Rodin reigns supreme, no sculpture more remarkable in originality and poetry of conception has been seen of late years in a public exhibition. Belgian art has not lost its vitality. Will it not emerge from its baptism of fire with the consecration of a noble purpose to express the honour, the patriotism, the self-sacrifice, that have glorified the land? CHAPTER XI LA JEUNE BELGIQUE IN LETTERS