A house may be built in a year or rented overnight; it takes longer than that to make it a home.

The farmers and peasants in Belgium had spent many hours of many days in keeping their homes beautiful, in making their farms self-supporting.

After the work of the day was finished they had planted gardens, had reared fruit- trees, built arbors; under them at mealtime they sat surrounded by those of their own household.

To buy the horse and the cow they had pinched and saved; to make the gardens beautiful and the fields fertile they had sweated and slaved, the women as well as the men; even the watch-dog by day was a beast of burden.
When, in August, I reached Belgium between Brussels and Liege, the whole countryside showed the labor of these peasants.

Unlike the American farmer, they were too poor to buy machines to work for them, and with scythes and sickles in hand they cut the grain; with heavy flails they beat it.