Page:Eekhoud - The New Carthage.djvu/274

246 But that evening, after having seen the ship disappear behind a bend in the river, and the spirals of smoke become indistinguishable in the mist lying over the polders, the good pastor would journey back slowly to his fold, as sad as a shepherd who has just delivered to the formidable unknown the half of a flock branded with a red cross by the drover.

If, however, the aristocratic and noble landowners, county-squires and baronets, had consented to reduce the rents, these lovers of the land would not have had to depart. They would be in a pretty pickle, when there were no longer any hands to clear their wide lands!

Some of the emigrants from Willeghem wore a sprig of heather in their caps; others had tied an armful of the symbolic flowers to the ends of their sticks, to the handles of their implements, and the most fervent among them were carrying off, with touching childishness, a handful of the native sand tied in a little box, or sewn in a bag, as an amulet.

Ingenuously, not to recriminate against the unnatural antipathy of their mother country, but to render her a last filial honor, these peasants flaunted their national costumes, the most local and characteristic attire; the men, their high and puffy caps of silk, coarse breeches, smocks of a peculiar cut and color, of dark blue bordering upon the slate grey of their sky, so that one might differentiate by their blouses the peasants of the North from those of the Midi;—the women wearing large winged lace caps tied to their chignons by a flowered ribbon, and those bizarre hats, shaped like a truncated cone, that have no like in any other country on earth.

At the moment of finally deserting their native land,