The country becomes more interesting as one gets into Belgium.
Windmills are frequent: in and near Lille are some six hundred of them; and they are a great help to a landscape that wants fine trees.
At Courtrai, we looked into Notre Dame, a thirteenth century cathedral, which has a Vandyke ("The Raising of the Cross"), and the chapel of the Counts of Flanders, where workmen were uncovering some frescoes that were whitewashed over in the war-times.The town hall has two fine old chimney-pieces carved in wood, with quaint figures,--work that one must go to the Netherlands to see.Toward evening we came into the ancient town of Bruges.The country all day has been mostly flat, but thoroughly cultivated.Windmills appear to do all the labor of the people,--raising the water, grinding the grain, sawing the lumber; and they everywhere lift their long arms up to the sky.Things look more and more what we call "foreign." Harvest is going on, of hay and grain; and men and women work together in the fields.The gentle sex has its rights here.We saw several women acting as switch-tenders.Perhaps the use of the switch comes natural to them.Justice, however, is still in the hands of the men.
We saw a Dutch court in session in a little room in the town hall at Courtrai.The justice wore a little red cap, and sat informally behind a cheap table.I noticed that the witnesses were treated with unusual consideration, being allowed to sit down at the table opposite the little justice, who interrogated them in a loud voice.
At the stations to-day we see more friars in coarse, woolen dresses, and sandals, and the peasants with wooden sabots.
As the sun goes to the horizon, we have an effect sometimes produced by the best Dutch artists,--a wonderful transparent light, in which the landscape looks like a picture, with its church-spires of stone, its windmills, its slender trees, and red-roofed houses.It is a good light and a good hour in which to enter Bruges, that city of the past.Once the city was greater than Antwerp; and up the Rege came the commerce of the East, merchants from the Levant, traders in jewels and silks.Now the tall houses wait for tenants, and the streets have a deserted air.After nightfall, as we walked in the middle of the roughly paved streets, meeting few people, and hearing only the echoing clatter of the wooden sabots of the few who were abroad, the old spirit of the place came over us.We sat on a bench in the market-place, a treeless square, hemmed in by quaint, gabled houses, late in the evening, to listen to the chimes from the belfry.
The tower is less than four hundred feet high, and not so high by some seventy feet as the one on Notre Dame near by; but it is very picturesque, in spite of the fact that it springs out of a rummagy-looking edifice, one half of which is devoted to soldiers' barracks, and the other to markets.The chimes are called the finest in Europe.It is well to hear the finest at once, and so have done with the tedious things.The Belgians are as fond of chimes as the Dutch are of stagnant water.We heard them everywhere in Belgium; and in some towns they are incessant, jangling every seven and a half minutes.The chimes at Bruges ring every quarter hour for a minute, and at the full hour attempt a tune.The revolving machinery grinds out the tune, which is changed at least once a year; and on Sundays a musician, chosen by the town, plays the chimes.In so many bells (there are forty-eight), the least of which weighs twelve pounds, and the largest over eleven thousand, there must be soft notes and sonorous tones; so sweet jangled sounds were showered down: but we liked better than the confused chiming the solemn notes of the great bell striking the hour.There is something very poetical about this chime of bells high in the air, flinging down upon the hum and traffic of the city its oft-repeated benediction of peace; but anybody but a Lowlander would get very weary of it.These chimes, to be sure, are better than those in London, which became a nuisance;but there is in all of them a tinkling attempt at a tune, which always fails, that is very annoying.
Bruges has altogether an odd flavor.Piles of wooden sabots are for sale in front of the shops; and this ugly shoe, which is mysteriously kept on the foot, is worn by all the common sort.We see long, slender carts in the street, with one horse hitched far ahead with rope traces, and no thills or pole.
The women-nearly every one we saw-wear long cloaks of black cloth 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.