at the Tête de Flandres Hôtel, at which “a Frenchman, who sat next me, insisted on my sharing his bottle of vin de Bourdeaux, and would not hear of my paying my share of the cost, saying that he was at home in his own country.” I find that I went after supper “to the top of a fine tower” (my second that day! I had a mania, not quite cured yet, for ascending towers), and started at five the next morning for Nieuport “in a vile little barge, in company with two young pedestrianising Belgians,” and arrived there about noon, after a most tedious voyage, and changing, without bettering, our barge three or four times. At Nieuport we found “a sort of immense overgrown gig with two horses, which conveyed eight of us to Ostend.” There I was most kindly and hospitably received by Mr. Fauche, the English Consul, and his very lovely wife. Mrs. Fauche had been before her marriage one of my mother’s cohort of pretty girl friends, and was already my old acquaintance. She was the daughter of Mr. Tomkisson, a pianoforte manufacturer, who had married the daughter of an Irish clergyman. Their daughter Mary was, as I first knew her, more than a pretty girl. She was a very beautiful and accomplished woman, with one of the most delicious soprano voices I ever heard. I was anxious to join my mother at Bruges, who, despite her literary triumphs, had passed through so much trouble since I had seen her. But it needed the reinforcement of this anxiety by a sense of duty to enable me to resist Mrs. Fauche’s invitation to remain a day or two at Ostend. I found my father and mother, and my two sisters, Cecilia and Emily, established in a large and very roomy house, just outside the southern gate of the city, known as the Château d’Hondt. It was a thoroughly good and comfortable house, and, taken unfurnished, speedily became under my mother’s hands a very pleasant one. Nor was it long before it became socially a very agreeable one, for the invariable result of my mother’s presence, which drew what was pleasant around her as surely as a magnet draws iron, showed itself in the collection of a variety of agreeable people--some from the other side of the Channel, some from Ostend, and some few from Bruges.