noble specimens of brickwork, or tiling rather, are these old Vauban walls!—­peep with curious mystery the upper stories and roofs of houses with an air of smiling security.  I catch a glimpse of the elegant belfry, the embroidered spires, and mosque-like cupolas, all a little rusted, yet cheerful-looking.  Dickens’s place, or two places rather—­for there is the greater and the less—­display to us a really lovely town-hall in the centre, the roof dotted over with rows of windows, while an airy lace-work spire, with a ducal crown as the finish, rises lightly.  On to its sides are encrusted other buildings of Renaissance order, while behind is a mansion still more astonishingly embroidered in sculptured stone, with a colonnade of vast extent.  Around the place itself stretches a vast number of Spanish mansions, with the usual charmingly ‘escalloped’ roof, all resting on a prolonged colonnade or piazza, strange, old-fashioned, and original, running round to a vast extent, which the sensible town has decreed is never to be interfered with.  A more pleasing, refreshing, and novel collection of objects for the ordinary traveller of artistic taste to see without trouble or expense, it would be impossible to conceive.  Yet everyone hurries by to see the somewhat stale glories of Ghent and Brussels.

[Illustration:  ARRAS.]

There was a general fat contented air of bourgeois comfort about the sleepy old-fashioned, handsome Prefecture—­in short, a capital background for the old provincial life as described by Balzac.  But the place, with its inimitable Spanish houses and colonnades—­under which you can shop—­and that most elegant of spires, sister to that of Antwerp, which it recalls, will never pass from the memory.  A beautiful object of this kind, thus seen, is surely a present, and a valuable one too.

A spire is often the expression of the whole town.  How much is suggested by the well-known, familiar cathedral spire at Antwerp, as, of some fresh morning, we come winding up the tortuous Scheldt, the sad, low-lying plains and boulders lying on either hand, monotonous and dispiriting, yet novel in their way; the cream-coloured, lace-worked spire rising ever before us in all its elegant grace, pointing the way, growing by degrees, never for an instant out of sight.  It seems a fitting introduction to the noble, historical, and poetical city to which it belongs.  It is surely ANTWERP!  We see Charles V., and Philip, and the exciting troubles of the Gueux, the Dutch, the Flemings, the argosies from all countries in the great days of its trade.  Such is the mysterious power of association, which it ever exerts on the ‘reminiscent.’  How different, and how much more profitable, too, is this mode of approaching the place, than the other more vulgar one of the railway terminus, with the cabs and omnibuses waiting, and the convenient journey to the hotel.