A band of dancing people bore down upon us and swept us apart. From a high balcony an Italian who had been a prisoner of war sang “_La Marseillaise_,” and though these people’s ears had been dinned with it all day, though their throats were hoarse with singing it, they listened to it now, again, as though it were a new revelation. The man sang with passion in his voice, as powerful as a trumpet, more thrilling than that. The passion of four years’ agony in some foul prison-camp inspired him now, as he sang that song of liberty and triumph. “_Allons, Enfants de la patrie!_ _Le jour de gloire est arrivé!_” The crowd took up the song again, and it roared across the square of Verviers until another kind of music met, and clashed with it, and overwhelmed it with brazen notes. It was the Town-Band of Verviers, composed of twenty-five citizens, mostly middle-aged and portly--some old and scraggy, in long frock-coats and tall pot-hats. Solemnly, with puffed cheeks, they marched along, parting the waves of people as they went, as it seemed, by the power of their blasts. They were playing an old tune called _Madelon_--its refrain comes back to me now with the picture of that Carnival in Verviers, with all those faces, all that human pressure and emotion,--and behind them, as though following the Pied Piper (twenty-five Pied Pipers!) came dancing at least a thousand people, eight abreast, with linked arms, or linked hands. They were young Belgian boys and girls, old Belgian men and women, children, British soldiers, American soldiers, English, Scottish, Irish, Canadian, Australian, Russian, and Italian ex-prisoners of war, just liberated from their prison-camps, new to liberty. They were all singing that old song of “_Madelon_,” and all dancing in a kind of jig. Other crowds dancing and singing came out of side-streets into the wide Grande Place, mingled, like human waves meeting, swirled in wild, laughing eddies. Carnival after the long fasting. Brand clutched me by the arm and laughed in his deep hollow voice. “Look at that old satyr!... I believe ‘Daddy’ Small is Pan himself!” It was the little American doctor. He was in the centre of a row of eight in the vanguard of a dancing column. A girl of the _midinette_ type--pretty, impudent, wild-eyed, with a strand of fair hair blowing loose from her little fur cap--was clinging to his arm on one side, while on the other was a stout middle-aged woman with a cheerful Flemish face and mirth-filled eyes. Linked up with the others they jigged behind the town band. Dr. Small’s little grey beard had a raffish look. His field-cap was tilted back from his bony forehead. His spectacles were askew. He had the happy look of careless boyhood. He did not see us then, but later in the evening detached himself from the stout Flemish lady who kissed him on both cheeks, and made his way to where Brand and I stood under the portico of a hotel.