Ghent, with its hundred thousand inhabitants and its considerable trade, has still the air of a town half-asleep, as if you had caught it yawning and stretching at half-past three on a summer’s morning. Its extent is much exaggerated in the current printed descriptions. Charles the Fifth’s time-honoured pun--“I could put Paris into my Gand” (that is, my glove)--is apocryphal and highly improbable. If you doubt it, mount the tower of the beffroi. People who lose their way in a labyrinth of lanes, always fancy they have travelled over an enormous area. Now, the map of Ghent puts you in mind of a Medusa’s head, or of the clustered worms that are taken out into the country, on a sultry day, to participate in the pleasures of a fishing party. Buy a map of Ghent, colour the streets blue, the river Escaut yellow, the river Lys red, and you will have a faithful representation of the famous Gordian knot, if you happen never to have seen one before. I long wandered about the streets of Ghent, trying to find the city, and could not. It is a town made up of bits of west-ends, Faubourg St. Germains, and fashionable suburbs, with no heart or kernel to it--no Cheapside, no Ludgate Hill, no Rue de Rivoli, no Rue St. Honoré. There is a slight recovery of suspended animation in the Marché-aux-Grains and the Rue des Champs; but the pulse, even there, beats very feebly. The market tries (when it is not market-day) to manifest its vitality in an unhealthy, spasmodic way, by book-stalls of amatory literature, over which a little censorship would be no great tyranny. In the street, to enter a fashionable lace and embroidery shop, we had to ring at the glass-door, as if it had been a private house. After waiting, while the lady up-stairs gave a touch of arrangement to her cap and her hair, we were duly admitted to make our purchase, much in the style of a morning call. Elsewhere, in the modern quarters, you see unbroken lines of large, handsome, well-painted houses, hybrids between a palace and a ladies’ boarding-school. Business may be transacted therein, but it is done in the quietest possible way. You see dentelles (lace), or calicots (calicos), engraved on a neat brass-plate on a house-door, as if some private individual,--Monsieur Dentelles, or Madame Veuve Calicots,--were living there on their property, in great state and dignified retirement. The older portions of the town are decorated with houses built before the window-tax was born or thought of,--with quaint, pointed gable ends, as if a child had been trying to cut fancy conic sections out of a red brick wall. But in whatever direction you wend your way, you can’t go twenty steps without crossing a bridge. For the convenience at once of the land-carriage and the canal navigation, these are swing bridges; often you have to wait while a barge, laden perhaps with vegetable mould for the pot-plants in training by one of the Vans,--Van Houtte, Van Schaffelt, or Van Geert,--intercepts the passage.