or. Piles of wooden sabots are for sale
in front of the shops; and this ugly shoe, which is mysteriously kept on
the foot, is worn by all the common sort. We see long, slender carts in
the street, with one horse hitched far ahead with rope traces, and no
thills or pole.

The women-nearly every one we saw-wear long cloaks of black cloth with a
silk hood thrown back. Bruges is famous of old for its beautiful women,
who are enticingly described as always walking the streets with covered
faces, and peeping out from their mantles. They are not so handsome
now they show their faces, I can testify. Indeed, if there is in Bruges
another besides the beautiful girl who showed us the old council-chamber
in the Palace of justice, she must have had her hood pulled over her
face.

Next morning was market-day. The square was lively with carts, donkeys,
and country people, and that and all the streets leading to it were
filled with the women in black cloaks, who flitted about as numerous as
the rooks at Oxford, and very much like them, moving in a winged
way, their cloaks outspread as they walked, and distended with the
market-basket underneath. Though the streets were full, the town did not
seem any less deserted; and the early marketers had only come to life
for a day, revisiting the places that once they thronged. In the shade
of the tall houses in the narrow streets sat red-cheeked girls and women
making lace, the bobbins jumping under their nimble fingers. At the
church doors hideous beggars crouched and whined,--specimens of the
fifteen thousand paupers of Bruges. In the fishmarket we saw odd old
women, with Rembrandt colors in faces and costume; and while we strayed
about in the strange city, all the time from the lofty tower the chimes
fell down. What history crowds upon us! Here in the old cathedral,
with its monstrous tower of brick, a portion of it as old as the tenth
century, Philip the Good established, in 1429, the Order of the Golden
Fleece, the last chapter of which was held by Philip the Bad in 1559, in
the rich old Cathedral of St. Bavon, at Ghent. Here, on the square, is
the site of the house where the Emperor Maximilian was imprisoned by
his rebellious Flemings; and next it, with a carved lion, that in which
Charles II. of England lived after the martyrdom of that patient and
virtuous ruler, whom the English Prayerbook calls that "blessed martyr,
Charles the First." In Notre Dame are the tombs of Charles the Bold a