nues. It has
blue and pink, and yellow and green, on its awnings and on its
house-fronts. It has a merry open-air life on its pavements at little
marble tables before little gay-coloured cafes. It has gilded balconies
and tossing flags and comic operas, and leisurely pleasure-seekers, and
tries always to believe and make the world believe that it is Paris in
very truth.

But this is only the Brussels of the noblesse and the foreigners.

There is a Brussels that is better than this--a Brussels that belongs to
the old burgher-life, to the artists and the craftsmen, to the master
masons of Moyen-age, to the same spirit and soul that once filled the
free men of Ghent and the citizens of Bruges and the besieged of Leyden,
and the blood of Egmont and of Horne.

Down there by the water-side, where the old quaint walls lean over the
yellow sluggish stream, and the green barrels of the Antwerp barges
swing against the dusky piles of the crumbling bridges:

In the grey square desolate courts of the old palaces, where in
cobwebbed galleries and silent chambers the Flemish tapestries drop to
pieces:

In the great populous square, where, above the clamorous and rushing
crowds, the majestic front of the Maison du Roi frowns against the sun,
and the spires and pinnacles of the Burgomaster's gathering-halls tower
into the sky in all the fantastic luxuriance of Gothic fancy:

Under the vast shadowy wings of angels in the stillness of the
cathedral, across whose sunny aisles some little child goes slowly all
alone, laden with lilies for the Feast of the Assumption, till their
white glory hides its curly head:

In all strange quaint old-world niches withdrawn from men in silent
grass-grown corners, where a twelfth-century corbel holds a pot of
roses, or a Gothic arch yawns beneath a wool-warehouse, or a water-spout
with a grinning faun's head laughs in the grim humour of the Moyen-age
above the bent head of a young lace-worker;----

In all these, Brussels, although more worldly than her sisters of Ghent
and Bruges, and far more worldly yet than her Teuton cousins of Freiburg
and Nuernberg, Brussels is in her own way still like some monkish story,
mixed up with the Romaunt of the Rose, or rather like some light French
vaudeville, all jests and smiles, illustrated in motley contrast with
helm and hauberk, cope and cowl, praying knights and fighting priests,
winged griffins and nimbused saints, flame-breathing dragons and
enamoured