Nais

“ Of all the countries of Europe at the present day Belgium is the one which with an equal area supports the most inhabitants; she feeds twice as many as France; the most populous of our departments, that of the North, is a portion which Louis XIV detached from her. Towards Lille and Douai you already see spread out in an indefinable circle, extending up to the horizon, this great kitchen garden, a deep and fertile soil diapered with pale grain sheaves, poppy-fields, and the large-leaved beet, and richly stimulated by a low, warm sky swimming with vapor. ”

“ The face of Belgium shows us many moods. Fisher villages and attractive seaside resorts give color to the long ribbon of sand that reaches for forty miles from the French to the Dutch border. To the east is the low-lying country from which Flanders—“the low land”—has its name. Beyond this expanse resembling the dike-protected regions of Holland is a naturally sterile sandy plain that Flemish farmers have by centuries of toil brought to a high state of productivity. ”

“ Traveling the roads of Belgium on foot or by steam tram, by slothful barge, or by the very efficient railways of the Belgian Government, we come upon many a picture of odd-fashioned roofs and mirroring water-streets, of city squares and gilded cornices, of farm cots scattered like sheep across the downs, of corpulent windmills busy at their grinding, of canal-boats moving among the flat Flemish fields, of soil-stained men and women tending crops of sugar-beets, flax and grains. ”

“ The Netherlands, or the Low Countries, were seventeen provinces occupying the flat lowlands along the North Sea,—the Holland, Belgium, and northern France of our own day. Most of the inhabitants, Flemings and Dutch, spoke a language akin to German, but in the south the Walloons used a French dialect. At first the provinces had been mere feudal states at the mercy of various warring noblemen, but gradually in the course of the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, important towns had arisen so wealthy and populous that they were able to wrest charters from the lords. ”

“ The lands which we are accustomed to group together under the name of the Netherlands or Low Countries lay chiefly within the bounds of the Empire; but the county of Flanders had always been a fief of France. ♦Fief of the Counts of Flanders within the Empire.♦ Part however of the dominions of its counts, the north-eastern corner of their dominions, the lands of Alost and Waas, were held of the Empire. ♦Zealand.♦ These lands, together with the neighbouring islands of Zealand, formed a ground of endless disputes between the Counts of Flanders and their northern neighbours the Counts of Holland. ”

“ New France already had a weak chain of water-side forts and commercial stations, the rendezvous of priests, fur-traders, travellers, and friendly Indians, extending, with long intervening stretches of savage-haunted wilderness, through the heart of the continent,—chiefly on the shores of the Great Lakes, and the banks of the principal river highways,—from Lower Canada to her outlying post of New Orleans. ”

“ The surface of the territory to the eastward of the imaginary longitude is barely scratched by the searcher of the picturesque and historical. Many of its towns are as interesting as any of those in the west, but, as a general rule, their peoples have been more easily influenced by German and Belgian methods, and, therefore, their characteristics differ greatly from those of the natives of North and South Holland and Zeeland, for example. ”

“ It is washed by several rivers, four of which are noble streams, namely, the Scheldt, the 55Lys, the Scarpe, and the Dender; and there are several canals, the chief of which is that between Bruges and Ghent.
Thus, in whatever way it be considered, Nature seems to have made ample provision for the happiness of the People: how far they are so, you shall hear when I come to give a general view of the Netherlands——that which is applicable to Austrian Flanders being equally so to all the other parts of the Netherlands, excepting those under the dominion of the Republic of the United States. ”

“ The Seine, no humble stream amid the army of rivers, superb in its channel, throwing its two arms about the head, the heart, the very marrow of the city, forms an island. Two suburbs reach out to right and left, the less excellent, even, of which begets envy in envious cities. ”

“ A reference to the physical geography of Europe shows you that the great northern plain, containing nine times the area of France, or about one half the area of Europe, extends from the Ural Mountains to the German Ocean.
"Doubtless the whole region now included in the Netherlands was once a mere swamp, a wild and useless morass, unfit for the habitation of man. Three great rivers, you perceive on the map, have their course, in whole or in part, through Holland and Belgium—the Rhine, the Maas, or Meuse, and the Scheldt. ”

“ There are also several inland waters; some are large, and others of less dimensions, which mostly lie near the sea-shores south of the North River; many of which are navigable and roomy kills and creeks suitable for inland navigation; and those by the industry of man are susceptible of great betterments and improvements, as may be seen by the chart of the New-Netherlands. ”

“ In later life, the story-teller went into the same places. What magic! There were villages, farms, schools, churches, happy homes, barns stored with grain, and many signs of joyous abundance, cows, sheep, orchards and fields.
What did it mean?
The story of “The Marriage of the Fairies,” explains in part how it came to pass. Water, brought in canals; that is, irrigation, wrought wonders; but, most of all, human continuance of toil, in unity of heart and will! Today the industry [252] and perseverance of men and women have made Belgium as one of the wonders of the world. ”

“ The change which has taken place on the littoral during the last fifteen or twenty years is extraordinary, and the contrast between the old Flanders and the new, between the Flanders which lingers in the past and the Flanders which marches with the times, is brought vividly before us by the difference between such mediæval towns as Bruges, Furnes, or Nieuport, and the bright new places which glitter on the sandy shores of the Flemish coast. ”

“ On the north, the river of Canada stretches a considerable distance, but to the north-west it is still undefined and unknown. Many of our Netherlanders have been far into the country, more than seventy or eighty miles from the river and sea-shore. We also frequently trade with the Indians, who come more than ten and twenty days' journey from the interior, and who have been farther off to catch beavers, and they know of no limits to the country, and when spoken to on the subject, they deem such enquiries to be strange and singular. ”

“ No sooner do we emerge from these gloomy precincts than we come upon the pretty little village of Nans, smiling and glowing in a warm sunlit valley, and most enticing to us after the sombreness and chilliness of the mountain-tops. ”

“ The Luxembourg is fragrant with budding trees, and vocal with half a thousand romping children; the Boule-Miche is at its liveliest, with a ceaseless ebb and flow of laughing young men and women; the terrasse of the Vachette is a mass of gleaming top-hats and flaunting feminine bonnets ”

“ I shall never think of Belgium without seeing endless processions of silent men and black-shawled women, pitchers in hand, waiting, waiting for the day’s pint of soup. One and one-quarter million make a long procession. ”

“ Served in the true Belgian style—customary alike in Flanders and in the Walloon provinces—it occupied our attention for the greater part of the afternoon, the courses following one another leisurely, with intervals between during which the men folk strolled about the garden and smoked. Two days later we started on the Professor’s itinerary, completely refreshed after the fatigue of our voyage; and after a bit of shopping at Brussels, our pilgrimage into the heart of Flanders began. ”

“ This immense tract of Land, the largest known which does not bear the name of a continent, as it is considerably larger than all Europe, is thinly inhabited even to admiration, at least that part of it that we saw: we never but once saw so many as thirty Indians together and that was a family, Men women and children, assembled upon a rock to see the ship pass by. ”

“ Belgium, after centuries of intermittent misery and recuperation as the cockpit of Europe, had with a hundred years of the peaceful fruition of the intelligence, courage, thrift, and industry of its people, emerged as the beehive of the Continent. ”

“ Upon the whole New Holland, tho in every respect the most barren countrey I have seen, is not so bad but that between the productions of sea and Land a company of People who should have the misfortune of being shipwreckd upon it might support themselves, even by the resources that we have seen. ”

“ In general, we say, to describe per species would take too long, and draw us from our original plan. We find in New-Netherlands many fine waters, kills, brooks and streams which are navigable, large and roomy, as well on the sea-board as far inland; also many runs of water, sprouts, stream-kills and brooks having many fine falls, which are suitable for every kind of milling work. Inland, there are also several standing waters and lakes, as large as small seas, also large rivers abounding with fish. ”

“ At length, it ascends a considerable inclined plane at Liege, once a very popular, powerful and still a handsome and important manufacturing town with 60,000 inhabitants; and here the beautiful and magnificently fertile table lands of Belgium spread out like a vast prairie before the traveler. In fact, the peasant cultivators are so commonly located in villages, leaving long stretches of the rarely fenced though well cultivated plain without a habitation, that the resemblance to level prairies which have been planted and sown is more striking than would be imagined. ”

“ The country is inhabited by two races. Draw a line across the map of Belgium and you divide the kingdom into two regions, inhabited by Flemings and Walloons.
Let the line pass from east and west through Brussels. North of this, as a rule, there are farms, gardens and sea coast. Here the people speak old Dutch, or Flemish, and most of them are fishermen, farmers, seaport men and traders. ”

“ At a word, we could use those people and make them Netherlanders. Our neighbours must put up with it, and the people who now go to the New-Netherlands are not lost or destroyed, but are as if they were placed at interest, for we know how fast the population increases. ”

“ In the Netherlands—which the first Napoleon characterized as a deposit of the Rhine, and as, therefore, by natural law, rightfully the property of him who controlled the sources of that great river—and on the adjacent Frisie, Low German, and Danish shores and islands, sea and river dikes have been constructed on a grander and more imposing scale than in any other country. The whole economy of the art has been there most thoroughly studied, and the literature of the subject is very extensive. ”

“ The provinces Holland, Zeeland, since enlarged by the addition of a small part of Flanders, the northern part of Gelderland including the county of Zutphen, Overyssel, Friesland, and Groningen, together with Drenthe, cover the whole territory of the present kingdom of the Netherlands except North Brabant and Limburg. ”

“ The visit was official and unique. Those of us who had lived in Paris during the Boer war—when, to say the least, the English were not popular, and had so frequently heard “Vivent les Boers” as we passed along the streets, and even had newspapers flaunted before us which recorded reverses to our arms—were very anxious that the [5] visit should pass off quietly. The English colony was much concerned, and so were the French police. I was advised by the latter to admit to the Church only by ticket, and to take the names and addresses of each applicant for them who might be unknown to me. ”

“ The national culture of Belgium is a synthesis, if I may so call it, where one finds the genius of two races—the Romance and the Germanic—mingled, yet modified by the imprint of the distinctively Belgian. It is in that very receptivity—the fact that it has absorbed and unified the best elements of Latin and Teutonic civilization—that the originality of the Belgian national culture resides. ”

“ During the sixteenth century, and especially at the beginning of the seventeenth, the name “Belgium” is to be found in books, but seems not to have been used as a common [5] designation. As a distinctive name for a race or people, the term “Belges” became generally used at the end of the eighteenth century, its adjectival form being then “belgique” (les provinces belgiques, “the Belgian provinces”) . Between the end of the Roman occupation and the end of the eighteenth century the Belgians were successively known as “Franks,” “Lotharingi,” and “Flemings.” ”

“ What would be termed provinces to-day were the duchies of Gelderland, Brabant, Limburg, and Luxemburg, the counties of Holland, Zeeland, Flanders, Namur or Namen, Hainaut or Henegouwen, and Artois, and the lordships of Utrecht, Friesland, Groningen with Drenthe, Overyssel, and Mechlin or Malines. ”

“ One of the great pleasures which I promised myself in my visit to Canada was from running these rapids, and I was not disappointed. At the Galouse, the river expands into a wide shallow stream, containing beautiful islands, among which the water rushes furiously, being broken into large waves, boiling, foaming, and whirling round. ”