y of the inhabitants have a private opinion that they can speak
English, which is not justified by fact. This gave a kind of haziness to
our intercourse. As for the Hotel de la Navigation, I think it is the
worst feature of the place. It boasts of a sanded parlour, with a bar at
one end, looking on the street; and another sanded parlour, darker and
colder, with an empty bird-cage and a tricolor subscription box by way
of sole adornment, where we made shift to dine in the company of three
uncommunicative engineer apprentices and a silent bagman. The food, as
usual in Belgium, was of a nondescript occasional character; indeed, I
have never been able to detect anything in the nature of a meal among
this pleasing people; they seem to peck and trifle with viands all day
long in an amateur spirit: tentatively French, truly German, and somehow
falling between the two.

The empty bird-cage, swept and garnished, and with no trace of the old
piping favourite, save where two wires had been pushed apart to hold its
lump of sugar, carried with it a sort of graveyard cheer. The engineer
apprentices would have nothing to say to us, nor indeed to the bagman;
but talked low and sparingly to one another, or raked us in the gaslight
with a gleam of spectacles. For though handsome lads, they were all (in
the Scots phrase) barnacled.

There was an English maid in the hotel, who had been long enough out of
England to pick up all sorts of funny foreign idioms, and all sorts of
curious foreign ways, which need not here be specified. She spoke to us
very fluently in her jargon, asked us information as to the manners of
the present day in England, and obligingly corrected us when we
attempted to answer. But as we were dealing with a woman, perhaps our
information was not so much thrown away as it appeared. The sex likes to
pick up knowledge and yet preserve its superiority. It is good policy,
and almost necessary in the circumstances. If a man finds a woman admire
him, were it only for his acquaintance with geography, he will begin at
once to build upon the admiration. It is only by unintermittent snubbing
that the pretty ones can keep us in our place. Men, as Miss Howe or Miss
Harlowe would have said, "are such _encroachers_." For my part, I am
body and soul with the women; and after a well-married couple, there is
nothing so beautiful in the world as the myth of the divine huntress. It
is no use for a man to take to the woods; we know him; St.