activeness. The houses seemed to have turned themselves inside
out to replenish the streets. People in their best clothes, equipages,
processions, bands, troops of children, filled the avenues. Some
conjecture that there might have been a mistake about the church took
us to the cathedral of St. Gudule. Here, amid the superb spectrums of
the stained windows, we searched through the vari-colored throngs that
covered the floor, but no familiar face looked upon us. Strange to
us as the old, impassive monumental dukes of Brabant who occupy the
niches, the people made way to let us pass from the doorway between
the lofty brace of towers to the high altar, which is a juggler's
apparatus, and has concealed machinery causing the sacred wafer to
come down seemingly of its own accord at the moment when the priest is
about to lift the Host. All was unfamiliar and splendid, and we came
away, feeling as if our own little wedding-group would have been lost
in so magnificent a tabernacle. The Grande Place, on which lay the
wedge-like shadow of the high-towered Hotel de Ville, was perhaps as
thronged a honeycomb of buzzing populace as when Alva looked out upon
it to see the execution of Egmont and Horn. Among all the good-natured
Netherlandish countenances that paved the square there was none that
responded to my own.

We drove vaguely through the principal streets, and then, baffled,
made our way to the faubourg in which is situated the zoological
garden, toward which a considerable portion of the inhabitants was
going even as ourselves. At the entrance our carriage encountered
that of the bride and groom, and soon the whole party of the
breakfast-table assembled by the gate, for the great coffee-rooms at
which our meal was laid were close by the garden, and a promenade
in this famous living museum was a premeditated part of the day's
enjoyment. We entered the grounds in character, frankly putting
forward our claims as a wedding-procession. That is the delightful
French custom among those who are brought up as Francine had been:
her father would have been heartbroken to have been denied the proud
exhibition of his joy, and Fortnoye was too great a traveler, too
cosmopolitan, to object to a little family pageant that he had seen
equaled or exceeded in publicity in most of the Catholic countries
on the globe. Francine, her artisanne cap for ever lost, her
gleaming dark hair set, like a Milky Way, with a half wreath of
orange-blossoms, t