We left Brussels this morning for Namur through the forest of Soigné and across the field of Waterloo. The forest is thick with young straight trees; and any thing but picturesque. The timber is chiefly beech with oak and elm intermixed, and the trees are very densely planted, with a view, we were told, to render the wood loose and moist being withdrawn from the hardy action of the air, in order that when felled and cut into lengths it may the more readily split, which the beech does almost spontaneously. The foresters live in huts dispersed throughout the forest; and along the edge of the road were long piles of cleft wood ready for transport to Brussels. On the road we passed several waggons laden with coals from Charleroi, and after emerging from the forest we reached the village of Waterloo, which is situated almost upon its outskirts. We visited the church with its numerous monuments to the “unreturning brave,” and were solicited by some ecclesiastical official for a contribution to the fund _for keeping them in order_. At Mont St. Jean we had a most comfortable breakfast at the little inn, and being waited on by Sergeant Cotton of the 7th Hussars, the guide who seems to have most successfully taken the place of Da Costa, we walked with him to the various positions on the field. One has really no patience with the great hulking mountain of sand on which the Iron Lion is raised as a trophy of the valour of the “Braves Belges!” Some one has observed that the pretension of the monuments at Waterloo are precisely in the inverse ratio of the importance of the services they commemorate; the English have none, the Prussians a modest record, and the Belgians a pyramid! on which, as the Brussels guide book magniloquently points out “the Lion of Belgian proudly paws the bolt of war, with his head turned towards vanquished France, as if to menace her with vengeance and teach her the homage which is due to valour!” But it is not the gasconade of this ambitious trophy that irritates one so much as the fact, that in order to scrape the earth together, out of which it is heaped up, the whole surface of the field has been disturbed and its identity destroyed; and that, at the most interesting spot, where the British guards made their immoveable and immortal stand “from day-break till set of sun” against all the chivalry of France. The mischievous vanity, which has thus destroyed what it pretends to commemorate, has something very _Irish_ in it, and is not altogether without a parallel. Some years since a remnant of a very ancient castle of the chiefs of the clan O’Neil, which stood upon the summit of the hill of Castlereagh in the estate of the late Marquis of Downshire, was fast crumbling away, owing to the injury which it received from the cattle who browsed about it, and his Lordship directed that a wall should be built round it to save it from utter destruction. The labourers, however, who were sent for the purpose,