316 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



Brussels, the city of laces, is partly French and partly 

 Flemish. In the upper parts of the town, with its magnificent 

 squares, palaces and parks, adorned with trees and statues and 

 fountains ; with its broad and beautiful promenades, full of a 

 gay and lively crowd of people, we seem to be in Paris. Down 

 the hill, through the street of the Nymphs, we meet only broad- 

 faced women, talking a language we do not understand, in 

 costumes we have never seen before, with old wooden shoes, 

 coming into the market with their fruits and vegetables. The 

 houses are quaint, the carts are quaint, the men move slow ; 

 antiquity itself could not offer us a scene more unique. 



We stopped in the upper town, in the square near the Hotel 

 de Ville. Here is where Charles the Fifth of Spain exercised 

 his gigantic power and ruled the destinies of so large a part of 

 Europe. It was afterwards, on the 7th of September, 1556, in 

 this same Hotel de Ville, that this proud monarch abdicated his 

 throne in favor of his son, Philip Second, voluntarily giving 

 up a power not often held by any man. Here, too, in the centre 

 of the square, now so beautifully shaded, the blood of Count 

 Egmont flowed at the order of the great Duke of Alva, who 

 stood in the window opposite and looked upon the execution of 

 his victims. This square rang with music at the magnificent 

 ball given to the officers of the allied armies, at which the Duke 

 of Wellington first heard that Napoleon had advanced to meet 

 him at Waterloo. Who has not read those soul-stirring lines 

 of Byron, beginning — 



" There was a sound of revelry by night, 

 And Belgium's capital had gathered then 

 Her beauty and her chivalry." 



♦ 



Who cannot imagine the sudden confusion which this 

 announcement must have made upon the joyous company, 

 so admirably expressed in the same beautiful poem ? 



"And there was mounting in hot liaste; the steed, 

 The nmstering squadron an<l the clattering car, 

 AVent pouring forward with inipi'tuous speed, 

 And swiftly forming in the ranks of war." 



There is a fine cathedral in the city, founded in 1010, but it 

 is not equal to many others wc have seen, cither in the magnifi- 



