Brussels is a gay little city that lies as bright within its girdle of
woodland as any butterfly that rests upon moss.

The city has its ways and wiles of Paris. It decks itself with white and
gold. It has music under its trees and soldiers in its streets, and
troops marching and countermarching along its sunny avenues. 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-colored cafés. 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 the Moyen-âge, 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 Horn.

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 gray 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