with a silk hood thrown back. Bruges is famous of old for its
beautiful women, who are enticingly described as always walking the
streets with covered faces, and peeping out from their mantles. They
are not so handsome now they show their faces, I can testify.
Indeed, if there is in Bruges another besides the beautiful girl who
showed us the old council-chamber in the Palace of justice, she must
have had her hood pulled over her face.

Next morning was market-day. The square was lively with carts,
donkeys, and country people, and that and all the streets leading to
it were filled with the women in black cloaks, who flitted about as
numerous as the rooks at Oxford, and very much like them, moving in a
winged way, their cloaks outspread as they walked, and distended with
the market-basket underneath. Though the streets were full, the town
did not seem any less deserted; and the early marketers had only come
to life for a day, revisiting the places that once they thronged. In
the shade of the tall houses in the narrow streets sat red-cheeked
girls and women making lace, the bobbins jumping under their nimble
fingers. At the church doors hideous beggars crouched and whined,
--specimens of the fifteen thousand paupers of Bruges. In the
fishmarket we saw odd old women, with Rembrandt colors in faces and
costume; and while we strayed about in the strange city, all the time
from the lofty tower the chimes fell down. What history crowds upon
us! Here in the old cathedral, with its monstrous tower of brick, a
portion of it as old as the tenth century, Philip the Good
established, in 1429, the Order of the Golden Fleece, the last
chapter of which was held by Philip the Bad in 1559, in the rich old
Cathedral of St. Bavon, at Ghent. Here, on the square, is the site
of the house where the Emperor Maximilian was imprisoned by his
rebellious Flemings; and next it, with a carved lion, that in which