Saunterings eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 306 pages of information about Saunterings.

Saunterings eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 306 pages of information about Saunterings.
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.

Next morning was market-day.  The square was lively with carts, donkeys, and country people, and that and all the streets leading to it were filled with the women in black cloaks, who flitted about as numerous as the rooks at Oxford, and very much like them, moving in a winged way, their cloaks outspread as they walked, and distended with the market-basket underneath.  Though the streets were full, the town did not seem any less deserted; and the early marketers had only come to life for a day, revisiting the places that

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Saunterings from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.