nd
Mary his daughter.

We begin here to enter the portals of Dutch painting. Here died Jan van
Eyck, the father of oil painting; and here, in the hospital of St. John,
are the most celebrated pictures of Hans Memling. The most exquisite in
color and finish is the series painted on the casket made to contain the
arm of St. Ursula, and representing the story of her martyrdom. You
know she went on a pilgrimage to Rome, with her lover, Conan, and
eleven thousand virgins; and, on their return to Cologne, they were all
massacred by the Huns. One would scarcely believe the story, if he did
not see all their bones at Cologne.

GHENT AND ANTWERP

What can one do in this Belgium but write down names, and let memory
recall the past? We came to Ghent, still a hand some city, though
one thinks of the days when it was the capital of Flanders, and its
merchants were princes. On the shabby old belfry-tower is the gilt
dragon which Philip van Artevelde captured, and brought in triumph from
Bruges. It was originally fetched from a Greek church in Constantinople
by some Bruges Crusader; and it is a link to recall to us how, at that
time, the merchants of Venice and the far East traded up the Scheldt,
and brought to its wharves the rich stuffs of India and Persia. The old
bell Roland, that was used to call the burghers together on the approach
of an enemy, hung in this tower. What fierce broils and bloody fights
did these streets witness centuries ago! There in the Marche au
Vendredi, a large square of old-fashioned houses, with a statue of
Jacques van Artevelde, fifteen hundred corpses were strewn in a quarrel
between the hostile guilds of fullers and brewers; and here, later, Alva
set blazing the fires of the Inquisition. Near the square is the
old cannon, Mad Margery, used in 1382 at the siege of Oudenarde,--a
hammered-iron hooped affair, eighteen feet long. But why mention
this, or the magnificent town hall, or St. Bavon, rich in pictures and
statuary; or try to put you back three hundred years to the wild days
when the iconoclasts sacked this and every other church in the Low
Countries?

Up to Antwerp toward evening. All the country flat as the flattest part
of Jersey, rich in grass and grain, cut up by canals, picturesque with
windmills and red-tiled roofs, framed with trees in rows. It has been
all day hot and dusty. The country everywhere seems to need rain; and
dark clouds are gathering in the south for a storm, as we d