In the great square, which is close by the banks of the river, stands the Town Hall, a flat looking building, and beside it, a news room and saloon for balls, but all seemed to be deserted, and we scarcely saw twenty persons within the walls. A sight of it is sufficient to satisfy one of the practicability of the expedient resorted to by Vendome, in 1706, when defending the town against the Duke of Marlborough, (or rather his brother, who conducted the siege) of laying the country under water up to the walls of the town. By a singular coincidence, however, the expedient proved unsuccessful, as the waters of the Scheldt fell so low as to reduce the floods on the lowlands to a fordable depth. The Duke, in his letter to Lord Godolphin, says: “Dendermonde could never have been taken but by the hand of God, which gave us seven weeks without rain. The rain began the very next day after we had possession, and continued till the evening. I believe the King of France will be a good deal surprised, when he shall have heard that the garrison has been obliged to surrender themselves prisoners of war, for upon being told that the preparations were making for the siege, he said: '_they must have an army of ducks to take Dendermonde_.’” Teniers lived in Dendermonde, of which his lady was a native, and the house he occupied, with a fresco over the mantel-piece of the saloon, is still shown to visitors. It has some manufactories of cotton and wool, but the only process we saw was one of those mills for crushing oil, which as they find both the raw material and the consumer upon the spot, seems to be amongst the most prosperous establishments in Belgium. The journey by the railroad from Dendermonde to Mechlin, a distance of sixteen miles, is performed in about half-an-hour. Mechlin quite comes up to one’s expectations of it. I had always heard of it by its soubriquet of _Malines la Propre_, and associated it with the stateliness and quaintness of “Mechlin lace:” and certainly it is just such an old place as one would imagine likely to produce such collars and lappets as one sees in Vandyke’s portraits--quiet, grotesque-looking old houses of great size, and with rich and sober ornaments and decorations to the points and gables, tall gothic churches, and streets accurately clean, with groups of cheerful, contented-looking loungers at the doors, and here and there a demure ecclesiastic, stepping silently along in his black gown and silk sash, with his little three-cornered hat and white bands, edged with black ribband, and broad silver buckles to his shoes.