elevation is conformable to that of the highest tides.  When the sea rises, they appear like navigators; when it retires, they seem as though they had been shipwrecked.  They subsist on the fish left by the refluent waters, and which they catch in nets formed of rushes or seaweed.  Neither tree nor shrub is visible on these shores.  The drink of the people is rain-water, which they preserve with great care; their fuel, a sort of turf, which they gather and form with the hand.  And yet these unfortunate beings dare to complain against their fate, when they fall under the power and are incorporated with the empire of Rome!”

The picture of poverty and suffering which this passage presents is heightened when joined to a description of the country.  The coasts consisted only of sand-banks or slime, alternately overflowed or left imperfectly dry.  A little further inland, trees were to be found, but on a soil so marshy that an inundation or a tempest threw down whole forests, such as are still at times discovered at either eight or ten feet depth below the surface.  The sea had no limits; the rivers no beds nor banks; the earth no solidity; for according to an author of the third century of our era, there was not, in the whole of too immense plain, a spot of ground that did not yield under the footsteps of man.—­Eumenius.

It was not the same in the southern parts, which form at present the Walloon country.  These high grounds suffered much less from the ravages of the waters.  The ancient forest of the Ardennes, extending from the Rhine to the Scheldt, sheltered a numerous though savage population, which in all things resembled the Germans, from whom they derived their descent.  The chase and the occupations of rude agriculture sufficed for the wants of a race less poor and less patient, but more unsteady and ambitious, than the fishermen of the low lands.  Thus it is that history presents us with a tribe of warriors and conquerors on the southern frontier of the country; while the scattered inhabitants of the remaining parts seemed to have fixed there without a contest, and to have traced out for themselves, by necessity and habit, an existence which any other people must have considered insupportable.

This difference in the nature of the soil and in the fate of the inhabitants appears more striking when we consider the present situation of the country.  The high grounds, formerly so preferable, are now the least valuable part of the kingdom, even as regards their agriculture; while the ancient marshes have been changed by human industry into rich and fertile tracts, the best parts of which are precisely those conquered from the grasp of the ocean.  In order to form an idea of the solitude and desolation which once reigned where we now see the most richly cultivated fields, the most thriving villages, and the wealthiest towns of the continent, the imagination must go back to times which have not left one monument of antiquity and scarcely a vestige of fact.