children ; they are determined to have a way
of their own, for the sake of having it. They
refuse to attend to good advice, because it is
counsel given by another ; and they persist
in some evidently inconvenient mode of doing
things, merely to show that they are
independent agents, and that they can and will
follow their own devices.

Ghent, with its hundred thousand
inhabitants and its considerable trade, has still
the air of a town half-asleep, as if you had
caught it yawning and stretching at half-past
three on a summer's morning. Its extent is
much exaggerated in the current printed
descriptions. Charles the Fifth's time-
honoured pun — " I could put Paris into my
Gand" (that is, my glove) — is apocryphal
and highly improbable. If you doubt it,
mount the tower of the beffroi. People who
lose their way in a labyrinth of lanes, always
fancy they have travelled over an enormous
area. Now, the map of Ghent puts you in
mind of a Medusa's head, or of the clustered
worms that are taken out into the country, on
a sultry day, to participate in the pleasures
of a fishing party. Buy a map of Ghent,
colour the streets blue, the river Escaut
yellow, the river Lys red, and you will have
a faithful representation of the famous
Gordian knot, if you happen never to have
seen one before. I long wandered about the
streets of Ghent, trying to find the city, and
could not. It is a town made up of bits of
west-ends, Faubourg St. Germains, and
fashionable suburbs, with no heart or kernel
to it — no Cheapside, no Ludgate Hill, no
Rue de Rivoli, no Rue St. Honoré. There is
a slight recovery of suspended animation in
the Marché-aux-Grains and the Rue des
Champs ; but the pulse, even there, beats
very feebly. The market tries (when it is
not market-day) to manifest its vitality in an
unhealthy, spasmodic way, by book-stalls of
amatory literature, over which a little censorship
would be no great tyranny. In the
street, to enter a fashionable lace and
embroidery shop, we had to ring at the glass-door,
as if it had been a private house. After
waiting, while the lady up-stairs gave a touch
of arrangement to her cap and her hair, we
were duly admitted to make our purchase,
much in the style of a morning call.
Elsewhere, in the modern quarters, you see
unbroken lines of large, handsome, well-painted
houses, hybrids between a palace and a ladies'
boarding-school. Business may be transacted
therein, but it is done in the quietest possible
way. You see dentelles (lace), or calicots
(calicos), engraved on a neat brass-plate on a
house-door, as if some private individual, —
Monsieur Dentelles, or Madame Veuve Calicots,
—were living there on their property, in
great state and dignified retirement. The
older portions of the town are decorated with
houses built before the window-tax was born
or thought of, — with quaint, pointed gable
ends, as if a child had been trying to cut
fancy conic sections out of a red brick wall.
But in whatever direction you wend your
way, you can't go twenty steps without
crossing a bridge. For the convenience at
once of the land-carriage and the canal
navigation, these are swing bridges; often you
have to wait while a barge, laden perhaps
with vegetable mould for the pot-plants in
training by one of the Vans,— Van Houtte,
Van Schaffelt, or Van Geert,— intercepts the
passage. The time is not exactly lost,
because it allows you to stare about you without
rudeness. But soon, the bridge-swinger
takes his toll from the barge, which he
collects by means of a wooden shoe at the end
of a string fastened to a fishing-rod; the
isthmus of planks is then replaced, and
resounds with the pattering of gros sabots.
Certainly, the popular costume is droll, in
its extremes. At top, the women wear a
close-worked cottage hat of straw, with three
dabs of blue ribbon stuck on behind; at foot,
they are garnished with masses of hollow
timber, which must be a serious drain on the
Belgian forests. But hats worn by women
at the same time with sabots, are, in French
eyes, or in eyes accustomed to France, as
utterly anomalous a combination as a fish-
tailed mermaid, or a man-headed centaur are
considered, on cool reflection, by Professor
Owen. Conspicuous in the air rise the portly
towers of St. Nicholas, St. Michel, and St.
Bavon, around which, and the lofty houses,
multitudinous swifts, whirl and scream, in
delight at the abundance of their insect
game. The canals are propitious to the
propagation of gnats. Where is the carcase,
there are the vultures; and where are the
gnats, there flock the swifts.

That the quietude of the town is more
apparent than real, and that busy life is
going on within, is plain from the Belgian
fashion of sticking looking-glasses outside the
houses, at angles (sometimes they glance in
three directions) which allow the inmates to
catch a glimpse of passers-by, without being
seen themselves. " Au Nouveau Miroir," (the
new looking-glass) is occasionally used as the
sign of an inn. The mirrors are generally
on a level with the first-floor; and a smaller
one receives the rays it reflects straight from
the entrance door; so that Not at home is
easily responded to the inquiries of a dun, or
worse, a bore. It is not one city alone which
adopts the system of quicksilvered peepers;
nor is the custom new, but was probably first
introduced by peculiarities of historical and
political situation. In Belgium, it, has not
always been convenient to open the door to
every new-comer.

"If you please, monsieur," we politely ask,
"have the goodness to tell us which is the
way to the Botanic Garden?"

"N'entends Français," is the reply,
accompanied by a disclamatory shake of the head.
It is a reminder that the Flemish tongue is
master here, in actual fact, if not by legal right.