They found a bit of charcoal and a piece of wrapping-paper, and Jan was all ready to write when a new difficulty presented itself. "What shall I say?" he said to Marie. "We don't know where we are going!"
"We don't know the way to any place but Malines," said Marie; "so we'll have to go there, I suppose."
"How do you spell Malines?" asked Jan, charcoal in hand.
"Oh, you stupid boy!" cried Marie. "M-a-l-i-n-e-s, of course!"
Jan put the paper down on the kitchen floor and got down before it on his hands and knees. He had not yet learned to write, but he managed to print upon it in great staggering letters:—
"DEAR MOTHER
WE HAVE GONE TO MALINES TO FIND YOU.
JAN AND MARIE."
This note they pinned upon the inside of the kitchen door.
"Now we are ready to start," said Jan; and, calling Fidel, the two children set forth. They took a short cut from the house across the pasture to the potato-field. Here they dug a few potatoes, which they put in their bundle, and then, avoiding the road, slipped down to the river, and, following the stream, made their way toward Malines.
It was fortunate for them that, screened by the bushes and trees which fringed the bank of the river, they saw but little of the ruin and devastation left in the wake of the German hosts. There were farmers who had tried to defend their families and homes from the invaders. Burning houses and barns marked the places where they had lived and died. But the children, thinking only of their lost mother, and of keeping themselves as much out of sight as possible in their search for her, were spared most of these horrors. Their progress was slow, for the bundle was heavy, and the river path less direct than the road, and it was nightfall before the two little waifs, with Fidel at their heels, reached the well-remembered Brussels gate.
Their hearts almost stopped beating when they found it guarded by a German soldier. "Who goes there?" demanded the guard gruffly, as he caught sight of the little figures.