ins broken open and
their risen occupants emerging in shrouds. Upon the walls around the
room were painted half-open doors and windows with pretty girls peeping
out; close down to the floor, a dog kennel, from which its savage
occupant was ready to spring; just above him, from a latticed window,
an old _concierge_ leaned out to ask our business. Even in the pictures
hanging upon the walls was something of this trickery. In one the foot
and hand of a giant were painted out upon the frame, so that he seemed
to be just stepping out from his place; and I am half inclined to think
that many of the people walking about the room were originally framed
upon the walls.

Brussels is always associated in one's mind with its laces. We visited
one of the manufactories. A dozen or twenty women were busy in a sunny,
cheerful room, working out the pretty leaves and flowers, with needle
and thread, for the _point_ lace, or twisting the bobbins among the
innumerable pins in the cushion before them to follow the pattern for
the _point applique_. When completed, you know, the delicate designs are
sewed upon gossamer lace. Upon a long, crimson-covered table in the room
above were spread out, in tempting array, the results of this tiresome
labor--coiffures that would almost resign one to a bald spot,
handkerchiefs insnaring as cobwebs, _barbes_ that fairly pierced our
hearts, and shawls for which there are no words. I confess that these
soft, delicate things have for women a wonderful charm--that as we
turned over and over in our hands the frail, yellow-white cobwebs, some
of us more than half forgot the tenth commandment.

_Table-d'hote_ over, one evening, "Where shall we go? What can we do?"
queried one of the four girls in our party, two of whom had but just now
escaped from the thraldom of a French _pensionnat_.

"It would be so delightful if we could walk out for once by ourselves.
If there were only something to see--somewhere to go."

"Girls!" exclaimed Axelle, suddenly, "was not the scene of _Villette_
laid in Brussels? Is not Charlotte Bronte's boarding-school here? I am
sure it is. Suppose we seek it out--we four girls alone."

"But how, and where?" and "Wouldn't that be fine?" chorused the others.
There was a hasty search through guide-books; but alas! not a clew could
we find, not a peg upon which to hang the suspicions that were almost
certainties.

"I am sure it was here," persisted Axelle. "I wish we had a _Villette_."