not to mention smaller towns of absorbing interest, such as Mons,
Namur, Hal, Tirlemont, Leau, and Soignies--may be easily visited,
more or less completely, in the course of a single day--owing to
all these facts many people will be glad to make this pleasant
city their centre, or headquarters, for the leisurely exploration
of most of Belgium, with the exception of the more distant and
out-of-the-way districts of West Flanders and the Ardennes. All
the places enumerated are thoroughly worth visiting, but obviously
only the more important can be dealt with more than just casually
here. Mons, on a hill overlooking the great coalfield of the
Borinage, with its strange pyramidal spoil-heaps, is itself
curiously free from the dirt and squalor of an English colliery
town; and equally worth visiting for the sake of its splendid
cathedral of St. Wandru, the richly polychromatic effect of whose
interior, due to the conjunction of deep red-brick vaulting with
the dark blue of its limestone capitals and piers, illustrates
another pleasant phase of Belgian ecclesiastical architecture, as
well as for the sake of a contest, almost of yesterday, that has
added new and immortal laurels to the genius of British battle.
Tournai, on the upper Scheldt, or Escaut, is remarkable for the
heavy Romanesque nave of its cathedral, which is built of the
famous local black marble, as well as for its remarkable central
cluster of five great towers. Soignies (in Flemish Zirick),
roughly half-way between Mons and Brussels, and probably little
visited, has a sombre old abbey church, of St. Vincent Maldegaire,
that was built in the twelfth century, and that is enriched inside
with such a collection of splendidly carved classical woodwork--
stalls, misericordes, and pulpit--as you will scarcely find
elsewhere even in Belgium. The pulpit in particular is wonderful,
with its life-sized girl supporters, with their graceful and