There are few cities in Europe of greater interest for the intelligent traveller than Bruges, the “cradle of opulent Flanders,” and the “Venice of the North.” The student in history, the connoisseur in art, the lover of antiquity, all find here ample instruction and enjoyment. Even the superficial traveller, hurrying on to more fashionable localities, but “doing” Bruges _en route_, as the correct thing, finds much to interest him in its quaint exteriors, silent canals, and old-world streets, to say nothing of its many treasures of pictures, sculptures, wood carvings, and other monuments of antiquity, to be seen only by penetrating into interiors, and looking deeper than the surface. “A decayed, dull place, where the grass grows in the streets,” was the verdict of a fellow-traveller, as the train from Ostend steamed into the modern Gothic unfinished station of Bruges on a wet day in last July. Not so. Bruges is neither decayed nor dull, nor does the “grass grow in its streets.” Gone is the day in which it could be written of the turbulent Flemish cities-- “Bruges et Gaud, qui toujours, ces bouillonnantes cuves, Ecclataient à la fois, ainsi que deux Vesuves;”[18] yet Bruges is still full of a steady kind of life and activity; and, as one of its intelligent citizens described it, “ce n’est pas ville morte; c’est une antiquité vivante,” retaining many tokens of the time when the proud Jeanne of Navarre, the Queen of Philippe le Bel, passing through streets lined with the palaces of its merchant princes, and observing the rich clothing of their ladies, cried out, “Je croyais être seule Reine de France; je vois ici cent reines que valent autant de moi.”