We sang all
the way home through Knightsbridge and by the Park railings, and the
Covent Garden carters halting at the Half-way House were astonished at
our choruses. There is no half-way house now; no merry chorus at
midnight.
Then Clive and J. J. took the steamboat to Antwerp; and those who love
pictures may imagine how the two young men rejoiced in one of the most
picturesque cities of the world; where they went back straightway into
the sixteenth century; where the inn at which they stayed (delightful old
Grand Laboureur, thine ancient walls are levelled! thy comfortable
hospitalities exist no more!) seemed such a hostelry as that where
Quentin Durward first saw his sweetheart; where knights of Velasquez or
burgomasters of Rubens seemed to look from the windows of the tall-gabled
houses and the quaint porches; where the Bourse still stood, the Bourse
of three hundred years ago, and you had but to supply figures with beards
and ruffs, and rapiers and trunk-hose, to make the picture complete;
where to be awakened by the carillon of the bells was to waken to the
most delightful sense of life and happiness; where nuns, actual nuns,
walked the streets, and every figure in the Place de Meir, and every
devotee at church, kneeling and draped in black, or entering the
confessional (actually the confessional!), was a delightful subject for
the new sketchbook.
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