e Belgian frontier
and saw bloody doings in the Franco-Prussian war.

Rocroi is a pompous little fortified place reached only by one road
and a narrow-gauge railway--literally two streaks of iron rust--which
penetrate up to the very doors of a pretentious Hotel de Ville with a
Doric facade, and not much else that is remarkable.

The town has a population of but two thousand, is surrounded by
fortifications, contains a Caserne, a Sous-Prefecture, a Prison, and
a Palais de Justice. All this officialdom weights things down
considerably, and, what with the prospect of the custom-house
arrangements at Givet, and the necessity of demonstrating to an
over-zealous _gendarme_ at Rocroi that we really had a "Certificat de
Capacite," and that the photograph which it bore (which didn't look
the least like us) was really ours, we were considerably angered and
delayed on our departure the next morning, particularly as we had
already been three days _en route_ and the frontier was still thirty
odd kilometres away.

As one passes Rocroi, Belgium and France blend themselves into an
indistinguishable unit so far as characteristics go. Manners and
customs here change but slowly, and the highroad must be followed
many kilometres backward toward Paris before one gets out of the
influence of Flemish characteristics.

We finally got across the Belgium frontier at Givet, at least we got
our _passavant_ here, though the Belgian customs formalities took place
at Heer-Agimont, formalities which are delightfully simple, though
evolving the payment of a fee of twelve per cent. of the declared
value of your automobile. You get your receipt for money paid, which
you present at the frontier station by which you leave and get it
back again--if you have not lost your papers. If you have you might
as well prepare to live in Belgium the rest of your life, as a friend
of ours told us he had done, when we met him unexpectedly on a cafe
terrace at Ostende a week later.

There be those who are content to grovel in dark alleys, among a
sordid picturesqueness, surrounded by a throng of garlic-sodden
natives, rather than while their time away on the open mountainside
or wide-spread lake or plain. All such are advised to keep away from
Southern Belgium, the Ardennes, and the valley of the Meuse at Dinant
and Namur.

We lunched at the Hotel des Postes at Dinant on the Meuse, and so
lovely was the town and its environs, and the twenty-eight kilometres
of v