rrydown, a fact that nobody would have known unless she
now and then accidentally happened to mention it herself, or else my
father did. And so I take the opportunity of slipping it in
here--just out of filial piety!

So the late autumn of that year found Barty and his aunt at Malines,
or Mechelen, as it calls itself in its native tongue.

They had comfortable lodgings of extraordinary cheapness in one of
the dullest streets of that most picturesque but dead-alive little
town, where the grass grew so thick between the paving-stones here
and there that the brewers' dray-horses might have browsed in the
"Grand Brul"--a magnificent but generally deserted thoroughfare
leading from the railway station to the Place d'Armes, where rose
still unfinished the colossal tower of one of the oldest and finest
cathedrals in the world, whose chimes wafted themselves every
half-quarter of an hour across the dreamy flats for miles and miles,
according to the wind, that one might realize how slow was the
flight of time in that particular part of King Leopold's dominions.

"'And from a tall tower in the town
Death looks gigantically down!'"

said Barty to his aunt--quoting (or misquoting) a bard they were very
fond of just then, as they slowly walked down the "Grand Brul" in
solitude together, from the nineteenth century to the fourteenth in
less than twenty minutes--or three chimes from St. Rombault, or
fifty skrieks from the railway station.

But for these a spirit of stillness and mediaeval melancholy brooded
over the quaint old city and great archiepiscopal see and most
important railway station in all Belgium. Magnificent old houses in
carved stone with wrought-iron balconies were to be had for rents
that were almost nominal. From the tall windows of some of these a
frugal, sleepy, priest-ridden old nobility looked down on broad and
splendid streets hardly ever trodden by any feet but their own, or
those of some stealthy Jesuit priest, or Sister of Mercy.

Only during the Kermesse, or at carnival-time, when noisy revelers
of either sex and ungainly processions of tipsy masques and mummers
waked Mechelen out of its long sleep, and all the town seemed one
vast estaminet, did one feel one's self to be alive. Even at night,
and in the small hours, frisky masques and dominoes walked the
moonlit streets, and made loud old Flemish mediaeval love, a la
Teniers.

There was a beautiful botanical garden, through which a river