ntique trees,
With thickets varied and with sunny glade;
Look where he will, the weary traveller sees
One gloomy, thick impenetrable shade
Of tall straight trunks, which move before his sight,
With interchange of lines of long green light."

"Here, where the woods receding from the road
Have left on either hand an open space
For fields and gardens, and for man's abode,
Stands Waterloo; a little lowly place,
Obscure till now, when it hath risen to fame,
And given the victory its English name."

Finally we reached Brussels, still over cobblestones, the road
growing worse every minute, and stopped at the Grand Central Hotel,
in the Place de la Bourse, the correspondent of the Touring Club de
France, and the only hotel of its class which serves its _table
d'hote_ "_vin compris._"

Brussels has ever been put down in the notebooks of conventional
travellers as a little Paris; but this is by no means the case. It
resembles Paris not at all, except that French francs pass current in
its shops and the French tongue is the language of commerce and
society.

What has less frequently been remarked is that Brussels has two
contrasting elements of life, which, lying close, one upon the other,
strongly exaggerate the French note of it all, and make the hotels,
cafes, restaurants, etc., take on that boulevard aspect which we
fondly think is Parisian.

French Brussels and Flemish Brussels are as distinct elements in the
make-up of this doubleheaded city as are the ingredients of oil and
water, and like the latter they do not mix.

When one descends from the hilltop on which is modern Brussels, past
the cathedral of Ste. Gudule, he leaves the shops, the cafes, and the
boulevards behind him and enters the past.

The small shopmen, and the men and women of the markets, all look and
talk Flemish, and the environment is everywhere as distinctly Flemish
as if one were standing on one of the little bridges which cross the
waterways of Ghent or Bruges.

The men and women are broad-bodied and coarse-featured,--quite
different from the Dutch, one remarks,--and they move slowly and with
apparent difficulty in their clumsy _sabots_ and heavy clothing. The
houses round about are tall and slim, and mostly in that state of
antiquity and decay which we like to think is artistic.

Such is Flemish Brussels. Even in the Flemish part, the city has none
of that winsome sympathetic air which usually surrounds a quaint
me