The beauty of Bruges is incomparable and unique. Threaded by winding canals, crossed by innumerable old stone bridges, where pink-and-grey walls, tall gables, spired turrets, leaning fronts of mullioned windows rise from old stonepaved quays and garden walls hung with vines and backed by tree tops; cut by narrow streets of ancient houses, with old churches and convents and chapels on every hand and with slender towers lifting over quaint market-places and little squares and sudden gardens, it is a continuous and ever-varying and never-exhausting delight that, so far as I know, finds its rival only in Venice. A city that has shrunken a little within its walls is always more beautiful than one that has burst them and is steadily intruding into the fleeing countryside. That is the difference between the advance of man and that of nature. Ghent, Rome, Nuremberg are kernels of sweetness surrounded by a monstrously expanding rind that is exceeding bitter, but Carcassonne, Rothenburg, Siena, Bruges are so wholly different there is no possibility of comparison. When the houses of an old town seem to huddle a little more closely together, while superfluous walls fall away and the tide of green comes lapping on already moss-grown walls to cover and obliterate the traces man has left of his less successful efforts, then you have something approaching a perfect environment, particularly if, as here, there are innumerable and endless treasures of the best that man can do, now carefully preserved, and growing better the nearer nature comes to touch them with her wand of magic. Architecturally, Bruges is fifteenth century with a singular consistency--when it isn’t of a century later or, and less conspicuously, of the fourteenth century; not that it matters much, it all hangs together because it is all of one mood and one impulse and one race. Its Hôtel de Ville, one of the perfect things in architecture, I have spoken of elsewhere; its churches, at least six of them, are each engaging in a different way, and each contains treasures of endless pictures, wood carving, metal work, vestments, gathered from ruined monasteries and churches to take the place of the greater treasures pillaged and destroyed by the Calvinists. Our Lady’s Church, with its curiously beautiful tower and its gem-like porch; the cathedral with its ugly modern tower and its fine interior with all its pictures and treasures of “dinanderie”; the Chapel of the Holy Blood, still fantastic and charming in spite of its sufferings at the hands of the French Revolutionists; St. Jacques, St. Gilles, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre with its noble tomb of Count Baldwin of Jerusalem and his wife. [Illustration: THE BELFRY OF BRUGES]