of his pencil! The hospital is particularly rich in them; and the legend
there is that the painter, who had served Charles the Bold in his war
against the Swiss, and his last battle and defeat, wandered back wounded
and penniless to Bruges, and here found cure and shelter.

This hospital is a noble and curious sight. The great hall is almost
as it was in the twelfth century; it is spanned by Saxon arches, and
lighted by a multiplicity of Gothic windows of all sizes; it is very
lofty, clean, and perfectly well ventilated; a screen runs across the
middle of the room, to divide the male from the female patients, and we
were taken to examine each ward, where the poor people seemed happier
than possibly they would have been in health and starvation without it.
Great yellow blankets were on the iron beds, the linen was scrupulously
clean, glittering pewter-jugs and goblets stood by the side of each
patient, and they were provided with godly books (to judge from
the binding), in which several were reading at leisure. Honest old
comfortable nuns, in queer dresses of blue, black, white, and flannel,
were bustling through the room, attending to the wants of the sick. I
saw about a dozen of these kind women's faces: one was young--all were
healthy and cheerful. One came with bare blue arms and a great pile of
linen from an outhouse--such a grange as Cedric the Saxon might have
given to a guest for the night. A couple were in a laboratory, a tall,
bright, clean room, 500 years old at least. "We saw you were not
very religious," said one of the old ladies, with a red, wrinkled,
good-humored face, "by your behavior yesterday in chapel." And yet
we did not laugh and talk as we used at college, but were profoundly
affected by the scene that we saw there. It was a fete-day: a mass of
Mozart was sung in the evening--not well sung, and yet so exquisitely
tender and melodious, that it brought tears into our eyes. There were
not above twenty people in the church: all, save three or four, were