The railroad took us to Antwerp, a distance of thirty-four miles, in something more than an hour and a half. As usual the country lay as level as a bowling-green, and now and then the line of the railway intersecting the old paved highway, shewed on either side a vista of elms and poplars, as straight as the flight of an arrow, and so long that no opening was discernible in the distant perspective: occasionally we flew past some Dutch looking country box, with its red roof and whitened walls, its clipped hedges and grave looking garden, with parterres of sunflowers and dahlias; and here and there a grim little château, surrounded at each angle by a turret, like a pepper-box, and covered by a tiled roof, as tall and as sharp as the peaked hat of a burgomaster, seated in a coppice of alders and firs, and looking as primitive and secluded as if the railroad were the first visitant that had broken in upon its retirement from time immemorial. One of these pompous little manor houses, at some distance from the road between Malines and Brussels, was a residence of Rubens; and another called the Dry Thoren or Three Towers, not far from it at Perck, was the property of Teniers. The intention of the great perpendicularity in the roofs, in the Low Countries, was to prevent the lodgment of snow in their severe winters, and in the towns were building ground was so extremely valuable, to obtain rooms for storing fuel and other bulky articles, without trenching upon the space below. The road between Malines and Antwerp, passes through the hamlet of Rosendael, (the Vale of Roses) where there was formerly a rich abbey of Cistercian monks. Duffill, a small manufacturing town, and a village bearing the remarkable name of _Vieux Dieu_, from a pagan temple, which is said to have been erected there at some remote period, and the site of which is pointed out in a clump of elms, a “sacred grove,” within which an altar is still erected on the occasion of any religious procession in the parish. Approaching Antwerp, the surface of the land becomes more uneven, much of it has been recovered from the rivers which traverse it, and is sunk in deep rich _polders_, which the roads traverse upon raised causeways. The agricultural toil seemed here to be extensively shared by the women, who were busied in its most laborious processes.