The Scheldt is here about the breadth of the Mersey at Liverpool, and we crossed it by a steam ferry, to the Tête de Flandres. During the reign of Napoleon, this passage was made by a flying bridge, one of those ingenious contrivances, which are still seen upon the Rhine, in which a line of boats, attached to a large float, and sustaining the length of the cable by which it is moored in the centre of the river, are moved from side to side across the stream, accordingly as their heads and helms are adjusted, to allow the force of the current to impinge upon them. The river opposite Antwerp is so deep, as to allow the largest vessels to lie close along side the wharfs, but its waters, from the nature of the soil they traverse, are always yellow with sand and mud, and rush past between the city and the Tête de Flandres, with a rapidity that anything but justifies Goldsmith’s title of the “_lazy_” Scheldt. In the river, nearly opposite the commercial basins, there occurred in 1831 an instance of heroic devotion in a young officer of the Dutch navy, for which it is rare to find a parallel. He was a Lieutenant, named Van Speyk, and in command of one of the gun boats, which had guard upon the citadel, whilst yet in the hands of the Dutch. It was in the month of February, and the little bark had been compelled to seek shelter from the drifting ice, by running into the harbour of Flushing. A storm, however, drove her from her moorings, and forced her on shore nearly opposite the city of Antwerp. The efforts of the crew to work her off were unavailing, and a crowd of the revolutionary canaille were already waiting on the quay, to secure the prize and their prisoners, when the young commander went below, and with the aid of one companion opened the powder magazine, gave his assistant a moment’s time to plunge into the sea, and then applying his match, blew up himself and thirty of his sailors, rather than fall into the hands of his enemies. On landing at the Tête de Flandres, the little fortress which commands the level polder in front of Antwerp, we drove along a causeway raised several feet above the level of the plain. This vast alluvial district was laid under water in 1832, during the siege of Antwerp, and continued submerged till 1835, when the water was again expelled; but three years ago, the breach in the dyke, which had been imperfectly repaired, gave way during an extraordinary tide, inundated the whole plain, and swept away some thirty or forty peasants, who were passing along the road to the market of Antwerp. The view back upon the city from this point is one of the finest imaginable, all its bold and salient features coming into one coup-d’œil; the river, the noble line of quays, the citadel, the gigantic Hanseatic depôt, and rising far into the sky, above them all, the majestic and beautiful tower of the Cathedral of Notre Dame.