I am half sorry already that I have told that little story of myself. Somehow the recollection is painful. And now I would rather hasten away from Brussels, and wander on to other scenes; and yet there are many things I fain would speak of, and some people, too, worth a mention in passing. I should like to have taken you a moonlight walk through the Grande Place, and after tracing against the clear sky the delicate outline of the beautiful spire, whose gilded point seemed stretching away towards the bright star above it, to have shown you the interior of a Flemish club in the old Salle de Loyauté. Primitive, quaint fellows they are, these Flemings; consequential, sedate, self-satisfied, simple creatures; credulous to any extent of their own importance, but kindly withal; not hospitable themselves, but admirers of the virtue in others; easily pleased, when the amusement costs little; and, in a word, a people admirably adapted by nature to become a kind of territorial coinage alternately paid over by one great State to another, as the balance of Europe inclines to this side or that; with industry enough always to be worth robbing, and with a territory perfectly suitable to pitched battles--two admirable reasons for Belgium being a species of Houns-low Heath or Wormwood Scrubs, as the nations of the Continent feel disposed for theft or fighting. It was a cruel joke, however, to make them into a nation. One gets tired of laughing at them at last; and even Sancho’s Island of Barataria had become a nuisance, were it long-lived.