W

IN SEARCH OF HIS ANCESTORS

HAT American is without the tradition, at least the assumption, founded upon the such evidence as his family name, of a distinguished ancestry stretching back into the mists of European history? It is a harmless weakness to cherish such hope or tradition, but it may prove a disappointing mistake to attempt verification of either upon the supposititious ancestral soil. A recent traveler from America carried, snugly tucked in with that part of his luggage which gave him no embarrassment at foreign customs houses, the pretty definite legend that a little district of French Flanders was the cradle of his race, and as his travels brought him nearer and nearer to the home of his ancestors his heart glowed and his curiosity grew. At Brussels he discovered the traditional form of his own surname over a butcher shop. It was a comfort to find that, according to the butcher's own testimony conveyed in large black letters, his was a "boucherie" of the first order, though it was painful to discover next day "La Boucherie Centrale du Gourmets," kept by an entirely different person of uninteresting and utterly undistinguished name.

At Bruges the traveller found himself within thirty miles of the commune and village supposed to be the territorial possessions from which his Flemish ancestors took name. Dropping into one of the fifty tiny drinkeries, which in Bruges bear the euphemistic name "estaminet" and are commonly housed in the most charming and least sanitary of red-tiled, steep-gabled houses dating back to the sixteenth or seventeenth century, he encountered an old Flemish peasant sitting on the ale bench with his wife. The two looked as if they had sat as models to a hundred painters of peasant life in Belgium. As the stranger entered the old man half rose and lifted his cap, at the same time pointing to the little woman beside him, and saying "Mein Vrow." Could it be that he recognized in the unexpected customer of the estaminet some lingering trace of the ancient Flemish nobility? At a word of inquiry the old man confessed that he knew the ancestral home of the stranger, and then, unrestrained by the hand and whispered voice of his wife, he poured forth what was intended to be information in a volley of incomprehensibly mixed Flemish and French patois. The traveller could make nothing out of all the old man's talk except an immense good will and the ancestral name many times repeated, but that was enough to encourage a man in a doubtful chase.

Next day the traveller found himself set down at a railway sta

tion marked "Landegem," less than ten minutes' walk from the village of that name. Most of the inhabitants spoke naught but Flemish, and as the visitor had not inherited the ancestral tongue he found himself for a time absolutely isolated. Of a young woman in the street who professed to speak French he inquired: "Ou est le maire?" and received the astonishing query in return, "Ma mére, monsieur?" He gave her up with a bow of apology, and by pure accident hit upon the office of the burgomaster, for which he should have inquired. By the aid of his own younger brother's portion of French and that of the burgomaster and his secretary, with a little of the burgomaster's very imperfect English, the traveller managed to make it understood that he was in chase of his ancestors.

The two officials took counsel, and at length they decided that the stranger's nearest probable relative in the region was a maid-servant at a brewery, whose grandfather had borne the ancestral name with the territorial sign "Van." That was just what the stranger sought, and he posted off with a note from the secretary addressed to Celeni Meiresonne. As it was impossible to make the secretary understand that the stranger desired the privilege of reading the note, yet necessary that he should know whether it contained anything that might mislead her to whom it was addressed, he took the liberty of opening it. Alas, it was in Flemish, but the stranger figured out that the essentials of his message to Celeni were conveyed. If the secretary had taken the opportunity of adding tender passages of a personal nature, they escaped the comprehension of the reader. Subsequently when the note was by mistake handed to the proprietress of an estaminet on the way to the brewery it was read in full by that lady, who handed it back with a puzzled smile, and directed the traveller to his proper destination.

The house of the brewer was a large and comfortable brick structure hard by a broad canal of vilest odor, and flanked just outside the hedge by a roadside ditch carrying the potency of fifty malignant fevers. At the door the visitor was met by a most attractive-looking young woman in black, whose frank and smiling eyes betrayed him into the hope that this was his long-lost cousin, a hope destined to early death, for it was the brewer's daughter. She read the note addressed to Celene Meiresonne, obtained by dint of her apparently fluent French and the traveller's caricature of that beautiful tongue, a pretty clear motion of what he wished, and then said she would call "la jeune fille." Celeni came. She was some inches under five feet tall, with a thick figure and short, coarse, toil-worn hands, but a well-featured, honest face, good

enough for any man's cousin, near or remote. Celeni spoke naught but Flemish, so the mistress undertook to interpret for the stranger. As the maid could not sit down in the presence of the mistress, and the latter delicately refrained from seating herself, the conversation had to be awkwardly carried on standing until a desperate resort to paper and pencil brought the brewer's daughter and the visitor to their chairs, while Celeni respectfully remained standing. Then proceeded this strange, three-cornered, trilingual conference, partly oral, partly writ

ten.

By dint of spoken French, English and Flemish the visitor learned that Celeni's folk were laborers, living at another village, a large family, none of whose Christian names were traditional in his own family. Resorting to the pencil, after he, the maid and the mistress had broken many times into laughter at the vain effort to arrive at an understanding through oral communication, he wrote: "How far from here is the home of the jeune fille?" and to this the mistress smilingly wrote: "The home of the jeune fille is to Mieerendre, one hour from here." To an inquiry as to how long Celeni's family had lived there the mistress wrote: "The father is forty-eight year and is natived from Mieerendre." By this method of procedure the inquirer obtained considerable information as to the names of Celeni's relatives, the size of her village and the number of brothers and sisters buried in the local churchyard, but not one word to throw the faintest ray of light upon his reputed ancestors. He laughed and shook his head; the mistress laughed; the maid laughed, and then took his leave, with an effusive exchange of bows and smiles. He thought it no more than cousinly to leave a franc in the care of the mistress to be handed to the maid.

The baffled traveller took his way back to the village through a flat farming country thick-set with the symmetrical ricks of hay and straw for which Flemings are famous. He saw a man cutting rye with. a short scythe, and another flailing it on a little threshing floor. Women were at work in the fields, crawling on hands and knees to dig and weed. A windmill slowly turned its huge wheels in the lazy air. Men and women clacked along the road in resonant wooden shoes, and the canal again smote the nostrils with its vicious odor. Everything in sight was eloquent of a simple farming country and of methods five hundred years old. In the village stood the fourteenth-century church of hard, weather-eaten, uncompromising stone, with a brick extension biult in 1728, and nothing very distinctive except a clock tower ending in a lofty spire upon which turned a gilded weathercock.

The ancestral castle was nowhere in sight, but the traveller turned to the house of the curé with some hope of aid in his search. A smiling maid and a grave but sympathetic older woman, each with the face that Flemish peasants have worn from time immemorial, were grieved that the curé was absent at the Ghent exposition. With some difficulty the visitor managed to make it understood that he would leave the father a note, and having laboriously written in his best French, lamentably unaccented, a request for a search of the parish records with the hope that his ancestors might come to light, after another exchange of smiles departed.

The hour was growing late and that sufficient "plain breakfast" of perfect coffee, delicious unsalted butter and admirable rolls, taken at eight o'clock in the very face of the noble Belfry at Bruges and to the music of its chimes, had begun to seem a long way in the past. The stranger stepped into an estaminet of comfortable size and asked the Flemish mistress for beer and food. The beer she fetched, but neither by word nor by sign could he make her understand that he was hungry. At length, after several neighbors had vainly endeavored to learn what ailed the stranger, two blonde pigtailed school girls of fourteen and sixteen came at a breakneck pace down the street, having caught the innkeeper's signal of distress, and pausing at the door to slip off their sabots, stepped stockinged into the room. They knew what "pain" and "beurre" meant, and in a jiffy the stranger had a satisfying supply of thickly buttered and delicious rye bread, so good that it enabled him to forget the close resemblance between the taste of the beer and the smell of that shocking canal. The school girls amicably sat by to see him eat his meal, and their brothers, sisters, cousins, and friends looked on from the doorway. Thirty centimes paid the bill and the girls declined a tip. The traveller then set out to make pictures of his ancestral village. Incidentally he made pictures of many of its inhabitants, for he was followed by an increasing crowd of young and old, who kept getting into the field of the camera. Not even the reputed ancestor who fought at Courtrai ever created such a sensation at Landegem as his possible descendant on that memorable day.

As to the curé, he has not yet replied to the request for information. Perhaps he could not read the inquirer's French, but it is pleasanter to think that the records of the family are so ancient as to baffle the skill even of the presumably learned father.

BOSTON Transcript.

E. N. VALLANDIGHAM.

M

THE IRISH SOLDIER: HIS HUMOR AND

HIS SERIOUSNESS.

EMORABLE words were spoken by an Irish member in the House of Commons during the South African War, on the gallantry of the Irish regiments. "This war has shown," said he, "that as brave a heart beats under the tunic of a Dublin Fusilier as under the kilt of a Gordon Highlander." A roar of laughter and cheers worthily greeted the saying. It may be far astray as to the anatomy of the Scotch, but the truth of it in regard to Irish courage has been emphasized by the victories and disasters alike of the great world war.

On all the fields of conflict, east and west, the Irish soldiers have earned the highest repute for valor. "They are magnificent fighters," says an English officer of an Irish battalion, in letters which he wrote home to his own people. A public school boy with a high reputation for scholarship, he became a soldier at the outbreak of war, instead of going to Oxford, and high-minded, courageous-as his death on the parapet of the trenches directing and heartening his men in bombing the enemy, testifies-his gay and sympathetic letters how that he was a good judge of character. He also says of his men, "They are cheerier than the English Tommies, and will stand anything." Cheeriness in this awful war is indeed a most precious possession. I have got many such glimpses of the Irish soldier at the front, and their total effect is the impersonation or bodying forth of a most human and interesting individual-very courageous, of a whimsical humor, kindhearted, wayward, with a childlike petulance and simplicity; and yet very fierce withal-thrown into sharper relief by the grim background of the war.

I met at a London military hospital an Irish Catholic chaplain and an Irish officer of the Army Medical Corps back from French Flanders. They told Irish stories to the great enjoyment and comfort of the wounded soldiers in the ward. "Be careful to boil that water before drinking it," said the doctor to men of an Irish battalion whom he found drawing supplies from a canal near Ypres. "Why so, sir?" asked one of the men. "Because it's full of microbes and boiling will kill them,' answered the doctor. "And where's the good, sir?" said the soldier. "I'd as soon swallow a menagerie as a graveyard any day."