As the ladies were somewhat fatigued by our rambles around Flanders it was decided that they would spend two or three quiet days with la tante Rosa while the Professor and I made daily excursions into wonderland, returning to the home of our hostess every night. The nearest point of interest was the city of Tournai, the oldest city in all Belgium. There was no direct railway line, however, and--as on many other occasions during our pilgrimage--we had no little trouble studying out a _correspondence_, or set of connections, that would take us there and back without loss of time. We started each morning before six o'clock and found the trains at that time of day made up mostly of fourth-class coaches filled with working people. The Belgian State Railway sells _billets d'abonnement_ for these trains at incredibly low rates--a few sous a month for short trips from one town to the next, and a few francs a month for rides half way across the Kingdom. I have known clerks residing in the extreme southern end of the Department of Hainaut, close to the French frontier, who ride every day to Mons, ten or fifteen miles distant, and there take a train for Brussels. The object of this low rate of fare is the paternal desire of the Government that labourers should be able to obtain work wherever it may be found and still retain their homes in the villages in which they were born and raised. Home ties are very strong in Belgium, and the people cheerfully travel considerable distances under this plan rather than move away from their relatives and friends. Economically it is a very good thing for the country as a whole, since it enables the labourer out of work to look for a place in a hundred different towns and the employer to draw his help from an equally wide area. Thus in times that are not abnormally bad there are very few industrial plants without their full quota of hands, and very few hands out of work.