r is shown the house at No.
10 Sternengasse, where Maria d' Medici died in 1642. Rubens lived in
this same house when a boy of ten years. There is a choice and
comprehensive gallery of paintings at Cologne.

From this city we turn our steps towards Paris, by the way of Antwerp,
Belgium, which is remarkable for its many churches, convents, and noble
public buildings, beautiful parks, and open squares. It has a population
of fully three hundred thousand, owing its attraction mostly to the fact
that here are gathered so many masterpieces of painting. The great
influence of Rubens can hardly be fully appreciated without a visit to
this Flemish capital, where he lived so long, where he died, and where
his ashes rest in the Church of St. Jacques. Here is the burial place of
many noble families, and among them that of Rubens, his tomb being
situated just back of the high altar. Above it is a painting by his own
hand, intended to represent the Holy Family, but its object is also well
understood as being to perpetuate a series of likenesses of the Rubens
family; namely, of himself, his two wives, and his daughter, besides his
father and grandfather. Vandyke and Teniers were also natives of
Antwerp, where their best works still remain, and where the state has
erected fitting monuments to their memory. Jordaens, the younger
Teniers, and Denis Calvart, the art master of Guido, the great Italian
painter, were also natives of this city.

The Cathedral of Antwerp, more remarkable for its exterior than
interior, is of the pointed style. Did it not contain Rubens'
world-renowned pictures, the Descent from the Cross, the Elevation of
the Cross, and the Assumption, few people would care to visit it. In all
the older portions of the town the houses have a queer way of standing
with their gable ends to the street, as we see them in Amsterdam and
Hamburg, showing it to be a Dutch fashion. Dogs are universally used
here in place of donkeys for drawing small carts. Beggars there are none
to be seen, to the credit of the city be it said.

From Antwerp we make our way to Paris, whence to take a brief trip into
Switzerland, which, after a journey by rail of three hundred and
twenty-five miles, we enter on the northwestern corner, at Bale, a
considerable city of nearly seventy thousand inhabitants, situated on
the left bank of the Rhine. Its earliest history was that of a Roman
colony; consequently there are many portions of the place especially