Two great canals, one connecting the town with the estuary of the Scheldt near the sea, and the other leading, through Bruges, to Ostend, admit merchant vessels and huge barges to a commodious harbour, where steam cranes and all the appliances of a busy seaport are in full swing. There never is a crowd in Bruges, except during the yearly Procession of the Holy Blood; but every day in Ghent, if by chance a drawbridge over one of the canals is raised, a crowd of working people gathers to wait impatiently while some deeply-laden barge passes slowly through, and, the moment the passage is free, rushes over in haste. These are Flemings in a hurry. One never sees them in Bruges. Ghent, then, is a modern commercial town; but, in spite of all the changes which time and progress have brought about, it is, like most of the other Flemish towns, full of sights which carry us back in a moment to the distant past. [Illustration: GHENT AN old lace-maker.] The Lys and the Scheldt, winding through Belgium from west to east, meet almost in the centre of the province of East Flanders; and at the point where they join a number of islands have been formed by numerous channels, pools, and backwaters which are connected with the two rivers. In early times, no doubt, the spot was nothing but a morass, and on one of the pieces of drier ground the first wooden houses of Ghent were erected. After that, during the course of centuries, the town spread from island to island, and as each island was occupied a bridge was built, so that by degrees between twenty and thirty islands, joined by a number of bridges, were covered with dwelling-houses and public buildings, and the whole surrounded by a wall and moat. But long before buildings of brick or stone replaced the dark wooden houses, of which only one now remains, the people of Ghent had acquired the character of being the most intractable of all the Flemings; and when Philip of Alsace, Count of Flanders, came back from the Holy Land, towards the end of the twelfth century, he erected, on the site of an old fortress which Baldwin Bras-de-Fer had built 200 years before, a strong castle for the purpose of overawing the townsmen. On the left bank of the Lys, which, passing through the middle of the town, threads its way close under the basements of the houses, is the Place Ste. Pharailde, with its picturesque buildings of the Middle Ages; and on the north side of this Place stand the massive remains of the old stronghold.