e to be
thankful for!)

The Mouton Blanc, opposite the railway station at Cambrai, gave us a
very good lunch, in a strictly _bourgeois_ fashion, including the
sticky, bitter _biere du Nord_. We paid two francs fifty centimes for
our repast and went away with a good opinion of Cambrai, though its
offerings for the tourist in the way of remarkable sights are few.

Cambrai to Arras was a short thirty kilometres. We covered them in an
hour and found Arras all that Cambrai was not, though both places are
printed in the same size type in the railway timetables and
guide-books.

Arras has a combined Hotel de Ville and belfry which puts the
market-house and belfry of Bruges quite in the shade from an
impressive architectural point of view. There is not the quiet,
splendid severity of its more famous compeer at Bruges, but there is
far more luxuriance in its architectural form, and, at any rate, it
was a surprise and a pleasure to find that any such splendid monument
were here.

The Spanish invasion of other days has left its mark all through
Flanders, and here at Arras the florid Renaissance architecture of
the Hotel de Ville and the vaults and roofs of the market-square are
manifestly exotics from a land strange to French architectural ways.

Arras, with its quaint old arcaded market-place, is a great
distributing-point for cereals. A million of francs' worth in value
changes hands here in a year, and the sale, in small lots, out in the
open, is a survival of the _moyen age_ when the abbes of a
neighbouring monastery levied toll for the privilege of selling on
the market-place. Today the toll-gatherer, he who collects the small
fee from the stall-owners, is still known as the Abbe.

Arras is quaint and interesting, and withal a lively, progressive
town, where all manner of merchandizing is conducted along very
businesslike lines. You can buy sewing-machines and agricultural
machinery from America at Arras, and felt hats and orange marmalade
(which the Frenchman calls, mysteriously, simply, "Dundee") from
Britain.

To Douai, from Cambrai, was another hour's run. Douai has a Hotel de
Ville and belfry, too, which were entirely unlooked for. Quaint,
remarkable, and the pet and pride of the inhabitant, the bells of the
belfry of Bible-making Douai ring out rag-time dances and Sousa
marches. Such is the rage for up-to-dateness!

There is a goodly bit to see at Douai in the way of ecclesiastical
monuments, but the chief a