professional picture guide. It is an extraordinary craze, by the way,
that our countrymen will want always 'to see the pictures,' as though
that were the object of travelling.

[Illustration: BOURSE. LILLE.]

One gazes with pleasure and some surprise at its handsome streets,
where everyone seems to live and thrive. There is a general air of
opulence. The new streets, built under the last empire on the Paris
model, offer the same rich and effective detail of gilded inscriptions
running across the houses, balconies and flowers, with the luxurious
_cafés_ below, and languid _flaneurs_ sitting down to their
_absinthe_ or coffee among the orange-trees. These imposing mansions,
built with judicious loans--the 'OBLIGATIONS OF THE CITY OF
LILLE' are quoted on the Exchanges--are already dark and rusted,
and harmonize with the older portions. At every turn there is a
suggestion of Brussels, and nowhere so much as on the fine _place_,
where the embroidered old Spanish houses aforesaid are abundant.

The old cathedral, imposing with its clustered apses and great length
and loftiness, and restored façade, would be the show of any English
town. The Lillois scarcely appreciate it, as a few years ago they
ordered a brand-new one from 'Messrs. Clutton and Burgess, of London,'
not yet complete, and not very striking in its modern effects and
decorations. These vast old churches of the fourth or fifth class are
always imposing from their size and pretensions and elaborateness of
work, and are found in France and Belgium almost by the hundred. And
so I wander on through the showy streets, thinking what stirring
scenes this complacent old city has witnessed, what tale of siege and
battle--Spaniard, Frenchman, and Fleming, Louis the Great, the refuge