being allowed to sit down at the table
opposite the little justice, who interrogated them in a loud voice.
At the stations to-day we see more friars in coarse, woolen dresses,
and sandals, and the peasants with wooden sabots.

As the sun goes to the horizon, we have an effect sometimes produced
by the best Dutch 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