barrack-like palace of the king; upon the third side, among others, our
hotel. Here we were happy in finding another family of friends. With
them we strolled down into the old town, after dinner, taking to the
middle of the street, in continental fashion, as naturally as ducks to
water; crossing back and forth to stare up at a church or into a shop
window,--straggling along one after another in a way that would have
been marked at home, but was evidently neither new nor strange here,
where the native population attended to their own affairs with a zeal
worthy of reward, and other parties of sight-seers were plying their
vocation with a perseverance that would have won eminence in any other
profession. Through crooked by-ways we wandered to the Grand Place of
the old city--a paved square shut in by high Spanish-gabled houses
ornamented with the designs of the various guilds. From the windows of
one hung the red, yellow, and black Belgian flag. There was no rattle of
carts, no clatter of hoofs. Down upon the dark paving-stones a crowd of
women, old and young, with handkerchiefs crossed over their bosoms, were
holding a flower-market. Just behind them rose the grim statues of the
two counts, Egmont and Van Horn,--who lost their heads while striving to
gain their cause against Spanish tyranny and the Spanish
Inquisition,--and the old royal palace, blackened and battered by time
and the hand of forgotten sculptors, until it seemed like the mummy of a
palace, half eaten away. Just before them was the Hotel de Ville, with
its beautiful tower of gray stone, its roof a mass of dormer windows. It
comes to me like a picture now--the gathering shadows of a summer night,
the time-worn houses, lovely in decay, the tawdry flag, and the heads of
the old women nodding over their flowers.

Brussels has a grand church dedicated to Saints Michael and Gudule. If I
could only give to you, who have not seen them, some idea of the
vastness and beauty of these cathedrals! But descriptions are tiresome,
and dimensions nobody reads. If I could only tell you how far extending
they are, both upon earth and towards heaven--how they seem not so much
to have been built stone upon stone, as to have stood from the
foundation of the world, solitary, alone, until, after long ages, some
strolling town came to wonder, and worship, and sit at their feet in
awe! We crept in through the narrow door that shut behind us with a dull
echo. A chill like that of a t