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July 14th, Saturday.-"To drag at each remove a lengthening chain,"-wife and daughters, and sons, and servants, and luggage,—all being translateable by the Latin "impedimenta," would be an entire physical impossibility, but for that one great help, dragoman Pierre he calls us "Ma famille," and takes care of us every way: without him we should be as helpless as a shipwrecked crew; and as for baggage and railway trains, there would but for him be perpetual bother, loss, and trouble. Some people are heroes to their valets; my worthy help is a hero to me.

After breakfast, we repeated our visits to gothic St. Michel, marble St. Nicholas (where a grand mass was going on over a sham coffin, for a young magnate, dead and buried a month agone), and once more to the Domkirk,-its crypt, its variegated marble chapels, its relievo paintings, and its wonderful pulpit: verily among such florid and opulent carving, a tame dull preacher, with his written essay, would be strangely out of place; I only wish some such spirit of decoration would arise in the slumbering Church of England, if it could avail to shame our drones into eloquence, and stir them into life: what we want for popular evangelizing, and the recovery of lost ground by our clergy among the masses, is earnest

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and eloquent extempore preaching. Took a carriage, and drove with our party up and down and round and about this beautiful unique mediæval Ghent,—every street a study, every tenth house a picture, and those grey old giants of churches contrasting wondrously with the hundred toy-like electric clocks, each at the corner of a street upon its lamp. Mems: -The Boulevard, Casino, Maison de force, La foire, La Marché-à-vendredi, with its Arteveldt and inquisition memories, the big old gun, St. Pierre, and its cold contrast of St. Paulish architectural frigidity, with the glow of gothic; La petite Béguinage, and plenty more; to be remembered when I read guide-books and see pictures. Ghent is, sans doute, a right exquisite and ancient ville: go and see it, if you doubt me. A third and last visit to churches and the Dom, with the younger children, to whose villager eyes these awful fanes are a marvel indeed; and so back per voiture to the railway, and on to Brussels by nine. Mems:Adventure with a pugnacious Englishman; and the jaunty-feathered regiment of Chasseurs; and the fertile fields; and hundreds of acres of hay, drenched by a thunderstorm; and Malines, with its scrambling change of trains, where, without good Pierre, half the children and all the luggage would have been lost irre

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vocably; and thence, on to Brussels, where palatial Belle Vue receives us next door to King Leopold.

(alas, for our Mother

15th, Sunday.-Everybody knows Brussels much better than I do once here as a boy some twenty-five years ago: so, not being at an undiscovered metropolis of Japan, there is the less need of any trouble of description. All to-day-besides home services, and church in a sort of room, under the unprofitable auspices of the Rev. Church hereabouts and in divers other continental places!)-I have been promenading, en grande tenue, about this bright, white, clean, prosperous, and beautiful city : marvelling also at the folly, as well as the sin, of shops kept open on Sunday. What a wretched, endless, changeless toil and thraldom, it must be for those poor shopkeepers, without one holiday or respite they were open, too, most of them, till late at night; but all for the pleasure of the thing, I suppose, for there seemed to be no

customers.

Barring this, Sunday is religiously observed here, so far as perpetual services are concerned; and sight-seers are at such seasons excluded from the churches. The Park, whereabouts we are at this splendid Bellevue Hotel,

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is quite a countryfied surprise in the midst of the city with dug-out valleys, and high echoing woods, and rural rambles on a small scale; but I would utterly abolish those trussed-up statues with their mended noses, and the figleaved Venuses, and the bill-sticking, handy to Leopold's plain palace; and the one crooked tree in the middle of the roadway, just at his porte-cocher. Godfrey of Bouillon greets me from my bed-room window; and the finely frescoed façade of St. Somebody, a Romanesque church, with most unmistakeable idolatry in it. I wish Godfrey would sit his horse better, and straighten his knees, and manage his standard less awkwardly. Item: while wishing impossibilities, it would have pleased me more if the builder of that glorious spire at the Maison de Ville, had found the centre of the edifice before he began to pile his filigree arches: the thing's lopsided. Here, as at Ghent, we see divers orders of monastic foppery,—Capuchins, with a neat new-knotted rope for ornament around their comfortable toga, surmounted by a sensible beard, and a cape for wet weather, the strange circlet of bristly hair being supposed to indicate the crown of thorns; Dominicans, and Carmelites, in black and white; Jesuits, with azure neckcloths, and all else black as their

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ST. GUDULE'S FETE.

morality; and priests, black all over, except the shaven crownpiece, which is available either as a hint of respectable baldness or a suggestion of the ringworm. But hair in these parts is very much masqueraded; everybody wears it as he likes,-a happy licence for all who hate shaving, or desire to be thought good-looking. Our table d'hôte to-day was as profuse as usual; I think we must each have had our plates changed three dozen times; and how all this luxury of delicious mouthfuls (you get no more at once) can be done at four francs a head, I can't guess: ices too, and plenty of truffles and champignons to match.

We missed a chance this morning in not seeing the annual procession in honour of St. Gudule, the questionable patroness of Brussels. Pierre was hemmed in for an hour by the crowd, on his way to tell us, and meanwhile the escort passed by: all we saw of it afterward, was the line of streets tastily decorated with paper flowers, flags, coronets, and green boughs; and the splendid altar of gold and colours, erected in the Townhall Place. Leopold must have a very respectable little army, as chasseurs, and grenadiers, and dragoons swarm everywhere, from Ostend hitherward: he has a chance to nurse his resources, not being implicated in the Crimea.

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