ary uniformity pervaded
everything--the same topics, the same people, the same landscape,
recurred day after day; and save what the season induced, there was
nothing of change in the whole round of their existence. And what a dull
honeymoon was it for that young bride at the old Chateau of Overbecque!
To toil along the deep sandy roads in a lumbering old coach with two
long-tailed black horses--to halt at some little eminence, and strain
the eyes over a long unbroken flat, where a windmill, miles off, was an
object of interest--to loiter beside the bank of a sluggish canal, and
gaze on some tasteless excrescence of a summer-house, whose owner could
not be distinguished from the wooden effigy that sat, pipe in mouth,
beside him--to dine in the unbroken silence of a funeral feast, and doze
away the afternoon over the _Handelsblatt_, while her husband smoked
himself into the seventh heaven of a Dutch Elysium--poor Caroline! this
was a sorry realisation of all her bright dreamings! It ought to be
borne in mind, that many descendants of high French families, who were
either too proud or too poor to emigrate to England or America, had
sought refuge from the Revolution in the convents of the Low Countries;
where, without entering an order, they lived in all the discipline of a
religious community. These ladies, many of whom had themselves mixed in
all the elegant dissipations of the Court, carried with them the most
fascinating reminiscences of a life of pleasure, and could not readily
forget the voluptuous enjoyments of Versailles, and the graceful
caprices of 'Le Petit Trianon.' From such sources as these the young
pupils drew all their ideas of the world, and assuredly it could have
scarcely worn colours more likely to fascinate such imaginations.

What a shortcoming was the wearisome routine of Overbecque to a mind
full of all the refined follies of Marie Antoinette's Court! Even war
and its chances offered a pleasurable contrast to such dull monotony,
and the young bride hailed with eagerness the excitement and bustle of
the moving armies--the long columns which poured along the highroad, and
the clanking artillery heard for miles off! Monsieur d'Aerschot, like
all his countrymen who held property near the frontier, was too prudent
to have any political bias. Madame was, however, violently French. The
people who had such admirable taste in toilet could scarcely be wrong in
the theories of government; and a nation so invari