passenger is allowed to stand on the open platform at the end of
the carriage--though sometimes nearly smothered with thick, black
smoke--and certainly no better method exists of exploring the
short stretches of open country that lie between town and town.
Belgian towns, remember, lie mostly thick on the ground--you are
hardly out of Brussels before you come to Malines, and hardly out
of Malines ere you sight the spire of Antwerp. In no part of
Europe, perhaps, save in parts of Lancashire and Yorkshire, do you
find so many big towns in so limited a space; yet the strips of
country that lie between, though often intolerably dull, are
(unlike the strips in Yorkshire) intensely rural in character.
Belgian towns do not sprawl in endless, untidy suburbs, as
Sheffield sprawls out towards Rotherham, and Bradford towards
Leeds. Belgian towns, moreover--again unlike our own big cities in
England--are mostly extremely handsome, and generally contrive,
however big, to retain, at any rate in their heart, as at Antwerp,
or in the Grande Place at Brussels, a striking air of antiquity;
whilst some fairly big towns, such as Malines and Bruges, are
mediaeval from end to end. This, of course, is not true of Belgian
Luxembourg and the region of the Ardennes, where the population is
much more sparse; where we do not stumble, about every fifteen
miles or so, on some big town of historic name; and where the
endless chessboard of little fields that lies, for example,
between Ghent and Oudenarde, or between Malines and Louvain, is
replaced by long contours of sweeping limestone wold, often
covered with rolling wood.

Ypres is distinguished above all cities in Belgium by the huge
size and stately magnificence of its lordly Cloth Hall, or Halles
des Drapiers. So vast, indeed, is this huge building, and so flat