It seems that on the night succeeding the interment, feeble voices were heard calling from the well.
This well is isolated in the middle of the courtyard.
Three walls, part stone, part brick, and simulating a small, square tower, and folded like the leaves of a screen, surround it on all sides. The fourth side is open.
It is there that the water was drawn. The wall at the bottom has a sort of shapeless loophole, possibly the hole made by a shell.
This little tower had a platform, of which only the beams remain.
The iron supports of the well on the right form a cross.
On leaning over, the eye is lost in a deep cylinder of brick which is filled with a heaped-up mass of shadows. The base of the walls all about the well is concealed in a growth of nettles.
This well has not in front of it that large blue slab which forms the table for all wells in Belgium.
The slab has here been replaced by a cross-beam, against which lean five or six shapeless fragments of knotty and petrified wood which resemble huge bones. There is no longer either pail, chain, or pulley; but there is still the stone basin which served the overflow.
The rain-water collects there, and from time to time a bird of the neighboring forests comes thither to drink, and then flies away.
One house in this ruin, the farmhouse, is still inhabited.
The door of this house opens on the courtyard.
Upon this door, beside a pretty Gothic lock-plate, there is an iron handle with trefoils placed slanting. At the moment when the Hanoverian lieutenant, Wilda, grasped this handle in order to take refuge in the farm, a French sapper hewed off his hand with an axe.
The family who occupy the house had for their grandfather Guillaume van Kylsom, the old gardener, dead long since.
A woman with gray hair said to us:
"I was there.
I was three years old.
My sister, who was older, was terrified and wept.
They carried us off to the woods.
I went there in my mother's arms.