ferry, where perhaps there sat a woman with her elbows on her
knees, or an old gentleman with a staff and silver spectacles. But
Boom and its brickyards grew smokier and shabbier with every
minute; until a great church with a clock, and a wooden bridge over
the river, indicated the central quarters of the town.

Boom is not a nice place, and is only remarkable for one thing:
that the majority of the inhabitants have a private opinion that
they can speak English, which is not justified by fact. This gave
a kind of haziness to our intercourse. As for the Hotel de la
Navigation, I think it is the worst feature of the place. It
boasts of a sanded parlour, with a bar at one end, looking on the
street; and another sanded parlour, darker and colder, with an
empty bird-cage and a tricolour subscription box by way of sole
adornment, where we made shift to dine in the company of three
uncommunicative engineer apprentices and a silent bagman. The
food, as usual in Belgium, was of a nondescript occasional
character; indeed I have never been able to detect anything in the
nature of a meal among this pleasing people; they seem to peck and
trifle with viands all day long in an amateur spirit: tentatively
French, truly German, and somehow falling between the two.

The empty bird-cage, swept and garnished, and with no trace of the
old piping favourite, save where two wires had been pushed apart to
hold its lump of sugar, carried with it a sort of graveyard cheer.
The engineer apprentices would have nothing to say to us, nor
indeed to the bagman; but talked low and sparingly to one another,
or raked us in the gaslight with a gleam of spectacles. For though
handsome lads, they were all (in the Scots phrase) barnacled.