The Duke of Wellington has his estate between Nivelles and Quatre Bras. Why did not the King of Holland confer on him the field itself? Above all, why are there so many monuments to all the subalterns, and none to the great Captain? It would have been surely more just, as well as wiser, to have reared that vast pyramid to mark the spot where the conqueror stood, than to provoke the remembrance that those who intrude themselves upon our notice by it, _four times turned to flight_. It is even said that a party of the “braves Belges,” notwithstanding all the terror in which they were scampering back to Brussels, under the panic that the day was lost, overtook the Duke of Wellington’s baggage near the forest of Soigné, and coolly took time to plunder it--rather than let it fall into the hands of the enemy. Lord Byron mentions his impression that Waterloo, as a plain, seems marked out for the scene of some great action. This is, of course, association in the imagination of the poet; but it is a curious coincidence that, in 1707, the Duke of Marlborough selected it as a desirable spot on which to encounter the French, and actually encamped, for many days, on the verge of the forest, in the hope of seducing Vendome to give him battle there. At the little cabaret of La Belle Alliance, to which we had sent our carriage on from Mont St. Jean, to await our arrival from Hougemont, we got some excellent light wine: at Marengo, some years ago, I got an equally refreshing draught, after a sultry walk over the field of battle. Houses are building at this little spot; and, in short, in every direction trees are felled, ground levelled, walls fallen, and cottages constructed; so that in a few years the individual features of the scene will be changed; but that which even time cannot efface--its deathless renown--will still, like Marathon, Preserve alike its bounds and boundless fame. We took the usual route by Jemappe and Quatre Bras, through the Waloon country. The flax crop was abundantly spread over the fields, undergoing the process of “dew rating,” or dew riping, in which the operation of detaching the cuticle from the wood and pith, is performed by merely exposing it on the grass without steeping. At Quatre Bras the wood has been cut down from which the British, under the Duke of Wellington, repulsed Marshal Ney in the affair of the 16th of June, in which the gallant Duke of Brunswick fell. The hill is now a naked height, which is seen on the right of the road to Sombreffe.