We left Brussels last Sunday (you are looking in your pocket-book, dear Aunt Mary, for the day of the month; I see you looking). The first place of any note we went to was Valenciennes, where we saw houses and churches in ruins, the effect of English wars and French revolutions. Though Valenciennes lace is very pretty we bought none, recollecting that though Coventry is famous for ribbons, and Tewkesbury for stockings, yet only the worst ribbons, and the worst stockings are to be had at Coventry and Tewkesbury. Besides, we are not expert at counting Flemish money, which is quite different from French, and puzzling enough to drive the seven sages of Greece mad. Even the natives cannot count it without rubbing their foreheads, and counting in their hands, and repeating _c'a fait, cela fait._ For my part I fairly gave the point up, and resolved to be cheated rather than go distracted. But indeed the Flemish are not cheats, as far as I have seen of them. They would go to the utmost borders of honesty for a couronne de Brabant, or a demi-couronne, or a double escalin, or a single escalin, or a plaquet, or a livre, or a sous, or a liard, or for any the vilest denomination of their absurd coin, yet I do not believe they would go beyond the bounds of honesty with any but an English Milor: they are privileged dupes. A maid at the hotel at Dunkirk said to me, "Ah! Madame, nous autres nous aimons bien de voir rouler les Anglais." Yes, because they think the English roll in gold. Now we will go to Cambray, famous for its cambric and its archbishop. Buonaparte had so much respect for the memory of Fénelon, that he fixed the seat of the present Archbishopric at Cambray instead of at Lille, as had been proposed. We saw Fénelon's head here, preserved in a church. But to return from archbishops to cambrics. Our hostess at Cambray was a dealer in cambrics, and in her bale of _baptistes_ she seemed literally to have her being. She was, in spite of cambric and Valenciennes lace--of which she had a dirty superfluity on her cap lined with pink--the very ugliest of the female species I had ever beheld. We were made amends for her by a most agreeable family who kept the inn at Roye: their ancestors had kept this inn for a hundred and fifty years; the present landlord and his wife are about sixty-eight and sixty, and their daughter, about twenty, of a slight figure, vast vivacity in her mind and in all her motions; she does almost all the business of the house, and seems to love _papa et maman_ better than anything in the world, except talking. My father formed a hundred good wishes for her: first, when he heard her tell a story, she used such admirable variety of action, that he wished her on the stage: then when she waited at supper, with all the nimbleness and dexterity of a female harlequin, he wished that she was married to Jack Langan, that she might keep the new inn at Edgeworthstown: but his last and best wish for her was that she should