utch artists,--a wonderful transparent light, in which the
landscape looks like a picture, with its church-spires of stone, its
windmills, its slender trees, and red-roofed houses. It is a good light
and a good hour in which to enter Bruges, that city of the past. Once
the city was greater than Antwerp; and up the Rege came the commerce of
the East, merchants from the Levant, traders in jewels and silks. Now
the tall houses wait for tenants, and the streets have a deserted
air. After nightfall, as we walked in the middle of the roughly paved
streets, meeting few people, and hearing only the echoing clatter of the
wooden sabots of the few who were abroad, the old spirit of the place
came over us. We sat on a bench in the market-place, a treeless square,
hemmed in by quaint, gabled houses, late in the evening, to listen to
the chimes from the belfry. The tower is less than four hundred feet
high, and not so high by some seventy feet as the one on Notre Dame near
by; but it is very picturesque, in spite of the fact that it springs out
of a rummagy-looking edifice, one half of which is devoted to soldiers'
barracks, and the other to markets. The chimes are called the finest in
Europe. It is well to hear the finest at once, and so have done with the
tedious things. The Belgians are as fond of chimes as the Dutch are of
stagnant water. We heard them everywhere in Belgium; and in some towns
they are incessant, jangling every seven and a half minutes. The chimes
at Bruges ring every quarter hour for a minute, and at the full hour
attempt a tune. The revolving machinery grinds out the tune, which is
changed at least once a year; and on Sundays a musician, chosen by the
town, plays the chimes. In so many bells (there are forty-eight),
the least of which weighs twelve pounds, and the largest over eleven
thousand, there must be soft notes and sonorous tones; so sweet jangled
sounds were showered down: but we liked better than the confused chiming
the solemn notes of the great bell striking the hour. There is something
very poetical about this chime of bells high in the air, flinging down
upon the hum and traffic of the city its oft-repeated benediction of
peace; but anybody but a Lowlander would get very weary of it. These
chimes, to be sure, are better than those in London, which became a
nuisance; but there is in all of them a tinkling attempt at a tune,
which always fails, that is very annoying.

Bruges has altogether an odd flav