Somewhere about the year 1560 this tranquil and beautiful country was devastated by a plague which carried off hundreds of its sparse inhabitants, and left many villages desolate. The legends of the countryside tell of places in which no human life remained.

The people of Janenne, headed by the doyen, made a pilgrimage in procession to the shrine of Our Lady of Lorette, and offered to strike a bargain. They promised that if Janenne should be spared from the plague they and their descendants for ever would each year repeat that procession in honour of Our Lady of Lorette, and that once in seven years they would appear under arms and fire a salvo. Whether in consequence of this arrangement or not, Janenne escaped the plague, and from that year to this the promised procession has never been forgotten. In course of time it became less the local mode than it had been to carry arms, and nowadays the great septennial procession can only be gone through after a prodigious deal of drilling and preparation.

A week or two after my arrival the villagers began to train, under the conduct of a stout military-looking personage, who had been in the Belgian cavalry and gendarmerie, and was now in honourable retirement from war’s alarms as a grocer. He traded under the name of Dorn-Casart—the wife’s maiden name being tacked to his own, after the manner of the country. This habit, by the way, gives a certain flavour of aristocracy to the trading names over even the smallest shop windows. ‘Coqueline-Walhaert, negotiant,’ is the sign over the establishment wherein a very infirm old woman sells centimes’ worth of sweetstuff to the jeunesse of Janenne, whilst her husband works at the quarries.

Monsieur Dorn is a man with a huge moustache, fat cheeks streaked with scarlet lines on a bilious groundwork, and a voice raspy with much Geneva and the habit of command. He rides with the unmistakable seat of an old cavalry man, and his behaviour on horseback was a marked contrast to that of the mounted contingent he drilled every day in the open place in front of the hotel. His steed, artfully stimulated by the spur, caracoled, danced, and lashed out with his hind feet, and Monsieur Dorn, with one fist stuck against his own fat ribs, swayed to the motion with admirable nonchalance. His voice, which has the barky tone inseparable from military command, would ring about the square like the voice of a commander-in-chief, and by the exercise of a practised imagination, I could almost persuade myself that I stood face to face with the horrid front of war.

When Monsieur Dorn was not drilling his brigade he was generally to be found at the CafÉ de la Regence, smoking a huge meerschaum with a cherry wood stem and sipping Geneva. Even in this comparative retirement the halo of his office clung about him, and seemed to hold men oflf from a too familiar intercourse; but one afternoon I saw him unbending there. He was nearly always accompanied by a dog, spotlessly white, the most ladylike of her species I remember to have seen. Her jet-black beady eyes and jet-black glittering nose set oflf the snowy whiteness of her coat, and were in turn set off by it. She had a refined, coquettish, mincing walk, which alone was enough to bespeak the agreeable sense she had of her own charms. Perhaps a satiric observer of manners might have thought her more like a lady’s-maid than a lady. A suggestion of pertness in her beady eyes, and a certain superciliousness of bearing were mingled with a coquetry not displeasing to one who surveyed her from the human height. To look important is pretty generally to feel important, but is, by no means, to be important. We discern this fact with curious clearness when we look at other people, but it is nowhere quite so evident as in what we call the brute creation. (As if we didn’t belong to it!) Perhaps there are intelligences who look at us with just such a pitying amusement and analysis—our prosperous relatives, who started earlier in the race of life than we did, and met with better chances.

In spite of airs and graces, natural and acquired, Lil’s claims to purity of race were small, though, like my older acquaintance, Schwartz, she was more a broken-haired terrier than anything else. Schwartz was simply and purely bourgeois. He had no airs and no pretensions; but Lil, whatever her genuine claims may have been, was of another stamp and fashion.

It was Lil who was the cause of Monsieur Dorn’s unbending. The fat old gendarme was putting her through a set of tricks, which she executed with complete aplomb and intelligence. There was nothing violent in these exercises; nothing a dog of the best breeding in the world could have felt to derogate from dignity. She was much petted and applauded for her performances, and was rewarded by two or three lumps of sugar, which she ate without any of the vulgar haste characteristic of most dogs in their dealings with sweetmeats.

The language of the peasantry hereabouts is that same Walloon tongue in which old Froissart wrote his Chronicles. It is little more comprehensible to the average Frenchman than to the average Englishman, but its vocabulary is restricted, and the people who talk it have enriched (or corrupted) it with many words of French. When the loungers in the cafÉ began to talk, as they did presently, it amused me to listen to this unknown tongue; and whenever I heard ‘la procession’ named, I enjoyed much the kind of refreshment Mr. Gargery experienced when he encountered a J.O., Jo, in the course of his general reading. La procession was not merely the staple of the village talk, but the warp and woof of it, and any intruding strand of foreign fancy was cut short at the dips of him who strove to spin it into the web of conversation. I myself ventured an inquiry or two, for all but the most ignorant speak French of a sort. Monsieur Dorn accepted a glass of pequet at my request (a fire-water, for a dose of which one halfpenny is charged, and upon which the unaccustomed stranger may intoxicate himself madly at an outlay of five-pence), and the fat and stately old fellow told me all about the origin and meaning of the pious form the village was then preparing to fulfil. He made the kindest allowance for my limited powers of speech, and bounteously fed my native sense of retiring humility with patronage.

The door of the cafÉ was open to the mild, fir-scented December air, though a crackling fire burnt noisily in the thin-ribbed stove. Lil made occasional excursions to the open doorway, looking out upon the passers-by with a keen alertness. She had some time returned from one of these inspections, and had curled herself at her master’s feet, when I heard a singular and persistent tapping upon the unclothed floor, and looking round caught sight of my friend Schwartz, who was making a crouching and timid progress toward us, and was wagging his cropped tail with such vehemence that it sounded on the boards like a light hammer on a carpeted flooring. At first I fancied that he recognised me, and I held out to him an encouraging hand, of which he took no notice. That air of propitiatory humility which I had seen in him when we had first encountered on Lorette was exaggerated to a slavish adulation. There is no living creature but a dog who would not have been ashamed to show such a mixture of transport and self-depreciation. He fawned, he writhed, he rapped his tail upon the floor in a sustained crescendo. The dumb heart had no language for its own delight and humility. Anybody who takes pleasure in dogs has seen the sort of thing scores and scores of times. It was the quality of intensity which made it remarkable in Schwartz.

Lil, for whom this display of joy and humbleness was made, was altogether unmoved by it. She was not merely regardless of it, but ostentatiously disdainful. She took a coquettish lady’s-maidish amble to the door, passing Schwartz by the way, and yawned as she looked out upon the street. Schwartz fawned after her to the door, and with a second yawn she repassed him, and returned to lie at the feet of the fat old gendarme. The absurd little drama of coquetry and worship went on until the old fellow arose with a friendly bon jour, to me, and a whistle to Lil, who followed him with a supercilious nose in the air. The despised Schwartz stood a while, and then set out after her at a ridiculous three-legged run, but before he had gone ten yards he stopped short, looked after the retreating fair in silence, and then walked off with a dispirited aspect in the opposite direction.

So far as I could tell, my shadowy enemy with the axe had taken himself away for good and all, but I was so fearful of recalling him that I kept altogether idle, and in other respects nursed and coddled myself with a constant assiduity. But it is a hard thing for a man who has accustomed himself to constant mental employment to go without it, and in the absence of pens, ink, and paper, books and journals, the procession bade fair to be a perfect godsend. Even when the inhabitants of the village took to rising at four o’clock in the morning, and fanfaronaded with ill-blown bugles, and flaring torches, and a dreadful untiring drum about the street, I forbore to grumble, and when on Sundays they turned out in a body after mass to see their own military section drilled in the Place of the Hotel de Ville, one bored valetudinarian welcomed them heartily. The military section had got down uniforms from one of the Brussels theatres,—busbies and helmets, and the gloriously comic hats of the garde civile,—dragoon tunics, hussar jackets, infantry shell-jackets, cavalry stable-jackets, foresters’ boots, dragoon jack-boots, stage piratical boots with wide tops to fit the thigh that drooped about the ankles,—trousers of every sort, from blue broadcloth, gold-striped, to the homely fustian,—and a rare show they made. They went fours right or fours left with a fine military jangle, and sometimes went fours right and fours left at the same time, with results disastrous to military order. Then it was good to see and hear the fat Dorn as he caracoled in a field-marshal’s uniform, and barked his orders at the disordered crowd like a field-marshal to the manner born.

Monsieur Dorn being thus gloriously lifted into the range of the public eye, Lil seemed to take added airs of importance. I say seemed, but that is only because of the foolish and ignorant habit into which I was born and educated. Ever since I can remember, people have been telling stories to prove that dogs have some sort of intelligence, as if—except to the most stupid and the blindest—the thing had ever stood in need of proof. There is nothing much more fatal to the apprehension of a fact than the constant causeless repetition of it. And then the tales of the intelligence of dogs are told as a general thing with a sort of wide-eyed wonder, so that the dog’s very advocates contrive to impress their readers with the belief that their commonplace bit of history is remarkable.

Of course there are clever dogs and dull dogs, just as there are sages and idiots, but any dog who was not a fool would have known and recognised his master’s splendour and importance if he had belonged at this epoch to Monsieur Dorn. Lil saw him sitting up there in vivid colours, heard him shouting in a voice of authority, and saw people answer to that voice There was not a Christian in the crowd who had a better understanding of the situation. To see her running in and out amongst the horses’ feet, ordering the sham dragoons and hussars about in her own language, was to know she understood the thing, and had invested herself with some of her master’s glory. Wherever she went, in and out and about, Schwartz, with his meek spikes raging in all directions, followed, close at heel. Almost everybody has seen the loud aggressive swaggering boy with the meek admiring small boy in his train. The small boy glorifies the other in his mind, setting him on a level with Three-Fingered Jack, or Goliath’s conqueror, and the aggressive boy, feeling rather than understanding the other’s reverence, does his best to look as if he deserved it. To see Lil swagger and to hear her bark, and to see the foolish humble Schwartz follow her, admiring her, believing in her, utterly borne away by her insolent pretence that the whole show was got up by her orders—to observe this was to see one half the world in little.

On other days Lil was as other dogs, except, perhaps, to the love-blinded eyes of Schwartz, but on Sundays, so long as the drills for the procession lasted, the field was all her own. One or two of her companions, carried away by her example, dared to run amongst the horses’ feet and bark. They were promptly kicked into the ring of spectators, and Lil was left alone in her glory. Of course it all went with his own confiding nature, and the state of complete slavery in which he lived, to persuade Schwartz of her greatness. She deserves at least that one truth should be admitted. She never gave her admirer the least encouragement so far as I could see. She never in a chance encounter in the street paused to exchange good-morrow. She never so much as turned a head in his direction. She tolerated his presence and that was all. But wherever she went he shadowed her. He was not obtrusive, but was content to keep at heel, and to be permitted to admire. I have seen him sit for half an hour on a doorstep, a canine monument of patience, waiting for her to come out, and I have seen her travel about the Place in apparently purposeless zigzags and circles for the mere pride and vanity of knowing how closely he would follow her least reasonable movements.

A week or two before the grand event came off there was a prodigious excitement in Janenne. An idea, originating in the military spirit of Monsieur Dorn, had been industriously put about, a subscription had been set on foot for it, a committee had been appointed to superintend its working, and now the glorious fancy was actually translated into fact. The procession was to be supplemented by artillery, and now here was a time-eaten old gun, mounted on a worm-eaten old carriage, and trailed in harness of rope by two stalwart Flemish horses. Here also was gunpowder enough to wreck the village, and the Janennois, who for a moral people have a most astounding love of noise, were out at earliest dawn of light on Sunday morning to see the gun fired. The first firing was supposed to be an experiment, and everybody was warned to a safe distance when the gun was loaded, whilst Monsieur Dorn arranged a train of powder, and set a slow match in connection with it. When the bang came and the old iron stood the strain everybody went wild with joy, and even Monsieur Dorn himself was so carried away by the general enthusiasm that he tested the piece all morning. It was finally discovered that the powder was exhausted, and the hat had to be sent round again for a new subscription.

The annual procession is far and away the greatest event of the year at Janenne, and the septennial procession would of itself be enough to satisfy any resident in the village that he had lived if he had but seen it once. Nobody dreamed of spoiling the procession for the sake of a cart-load or so of gunpowder, and the hat was soon filled. Next Sunday Janenne enjoyed a new series of experiments on the big gun, and what with the banging of the drum, and the blowing of the bugle, and the flaming of torches in the dark morning, and the banging of the big gun from dawn till noon, and the clatter and glitter of the drill in the after part of the short winter day, the atmosphere of the village was altogether warlike.

The big gun gave Lil an added claim on the veneration of her admirer. On the morning of the second firing she came demurely down to the field in which the artillery experiments were conducted, with an air of knowing all about it, and Schwartz, as usual, pursued her. The gun was sponged and loaded, and the charge was rammed home under Monsieur Dorn’s supervision, Lil standing gravely by, and Schwartz grovelling in her neighbourhood. Then the old gendarme himself primed the piece, and taking a torch from a boy who stood near him applied it to the touch-hole. Out at the muzzle sprang the answering flame and roar, and away went Schwartz as if he had been projected by the force of the powder. Panic declared itself in every hair, and his usual foolish three-legged amble was exchanged for a pace like that of a greyhound. He had gone but a hundred yards at most, when reason resumed her seat. He stopped and turned, and after a little pause came back with an evident shamefacedness. Lil had stood her ground without the slightest sign of fear, and when Schwartz returned she took to looking so triumphantly, and superintended the subsequent operations with so much authority, that I am profoundly convinced of her intent to persuade her slavish follower that this was some new and astonishing form of bark of which she alone possessed the secret.

Schwartz was most probably willing to believe anything she told him. It is the way of some natures to confide, and it is the way of others to presume upon their confidence.