This I Did, And Passing
Through Compeigne, Where Joan Of Arc Was Made Prisoner - A Town Lying In
The Midst
Of extensive forests, with here and there a noble group of
trees; and through Noyon, where Calvin was born, and
In the old Gothic
church of which he doubtless worshiped; and through Cambray, where Fenelon
lived; and through fields of grain and poppy and clover, where women were
at work, reaping the wheat, or mowing and stacking the ripe poppies, or
digging with spades in their wet clothes, for it had rained every day but
one during the thirteen we were in France, we arrived in the afternoon of
the second day at the French frontier. From this a railway took us in a
few hours to Brussels. Imagine a rather clean-looking city, of large
light-colored buildings mostly covered with stucco, situated on an
irregular declivity, with a shady park in the highest part surrounded by
palaces, and a little lower down a fine old Gothic cathedral, and still
lower down, the old Town Hall, also of Gothic architecture, and scarcely
less venerable, standing in a noble paved square, around which are white
and stately edifices, built in the era of the Spanish dominion; - imagine
handsome shops and a good-looking people, with a liberal sprinkling of
priests, in their long-skirted garments, and throw in the usual proportion
of dirt and misery, and mendicancy, in the corners and by-places, and you
have Brussels before you.
It still rained, but we got a tilbury and drove out to see the
battle-ground of Waterloo.
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