A ramble around the fortifications will show how strong are the defences of the city, which have been constructed since the last siege in 1832. Walls and citadels, well provided with points of vantage for artillery fire, begirt Antwerp to-day. The forts and barriers cost an enormous sum. Guns and ammunition are made in the city, which is the chief fortress of the country, and an important military centre. In the Grande Place stands the town hall, a florid building, containing several paintings, though none of remarkable note, except some frescoes by Leys, one of the most eminent of modern Belgian painters. Our tour of the city must include a visit to the house of Rubens, in the street named after him. The archway is from the designs of the painter, whose studio was in the grounds. The first Exchange was erected in 1531, and destroyed by fire in 1858. It was from this building that the plan of the London Royal Exchange was taken. The modern Bourse is in the Rue de la Bourse. Antwerp is architecturally a handsome city, with several fine squares, wide promenades, and well-planned streets. The docks are extensive, and the long quays stretch thence to the old fort on the south side. There is a triangular park with sheets of water, beyond the great Boulevard, and in the zoological garden is a fairly representative collection of animals. In the Rue Leopold is the botanic garden. The Plantin Museum, containing relics and volumes of one famous printer, is one of the public institutions that must be visited. Such are the chief monuments and objects of interest in the old city of Antwerp, where the ancient and the modern are both represented side by side in odd contrast. AMSTERDAM A horn of flatland, bounded by the North Sea and the Zuyder Zee, juts northward, with Haarlem and Amsterdam at its base. Sundered by a channel from the point of the horn is Texel, the biggest of the curious line of islands that stretches along the coast to Friesland. This Helder, or "Hell's Door," the tidal channel leading to the broad inlet of the Zuyder Zee, runs like a mill-race, and the passage is deep enough to admit large vessels travelling to the port of Amsterdam. The capital of Holland is built upon logs driven into the firm earth through morass and silt. It is a city of canals and dykes, spanned by hundreds of bridges, a northern Venice, dependent for its safety upon the proper control of sluices. The devouring sea is kept at bay by a mighty dam. Truly, Amsterdam is one of the wonders of men's ingenuity. The plan of its streets is remarkable; the thoroughfares are a series of semi-circles with their points to the Zuyder Zee. The flow of the canals and waterways that wind about the city is impelled by artificial means. The number of the piles upon which the palace of Amsterdam stands is reckoned at nearly fourteen thousand.