I
have seen old men at Versailles, with shabby coats and pigtails, sunning
themselves on the benches in the walls; they had seen better days, to be
sure, but they were gentlemen still: and so we found, this morning, old
dowager Bruges basking in the pleasant August sun, and looking if not
prosperous, at least cheerful and well-bred. It is the quaintest and
prettiest of all the quaint and pretty towns I have seen. A painter
might spend months here, and wander from church to church, and admire
old towers and pinnacles, tall gables, bright canals, and pretty little
patches of green garden and moss-grown wall, that reflect in the clear
quiet water. Before the inn-window is a garden, from which in the early
morning issues a most wonderful odor of stocks and wallflowers; next
comes a road with trees of admirable green; numbers of little children
are playing in this road (the place is so clean that they may roll in it
all day without soiling their pinafores), and on the other side of the
trees are little old-fashioned, dumpy, whitewashed, red-tiled houses. A
poorer landscape to draw never was known, nor a pleasanter to see--the
children especially, who are inordinately fat and rosy. Let it be
remembered, too, that here we are out of the country of ugly women: the
expression of the face is almost uniformly gentle and pleasing, and the
figures of the women, wrapped in long black monk-like cloaks and hoods,
very picturesque. No wonder there are so many children: the "Guide-book"
(omniscient Mr. Murray!) says there are fifteen thousand paupers in the
town, and we know how such multiply. How the deuce do their children
look so fat and rosy? By eating dirt-pies, I suppose. I saw a couple
making a very nice savory one, and another employed in gravely sticking
strips of stick betwixt the pebbles at the house-door, and so making for
herself a stately garden. The men and women don't seem to have much more
to do. There are a couple of tall chimneys at either suburb of the town,
where no doubt manufactories are at work, but within the walls everybody
seems decently idle.

We have been, of course, abroad to visit the lions. The tower in the
Grand Place is very fine, and the bricks of which it is built do not
yield a whit in color to the best stone. The great building round this
tower is very like the pictures of the Ducal Palace at Venice; and there
is a long market area, with columns down the middle, from which hung
shreds of rather lean-