It was a queer and not very edifying society, exceedingly strange, and somewhat bewildering to a lad fresh from Oxford who was making his first acquaintance with Continental ways and manners. All the married couples seemed to be continually dancing the figure of _chassée croisez_, and I, who had no wife of my own, and was not yet old enough to know better, thought it extremely amusing. When October came, and I had not heard anything from Birmingham of the appointment to a mastership in the school there, for which I had been all this time waiting, I thought it was time to look up my Birmingham friends and see how matters stood there. At Birmingham I found that the governors of King Edward’s School were still shilly-shallying; but I heard enough to convince me that no new master would be appointed till the very fine new building which now ornaments the town, but was then in course of construction, should be completed. Having become convinced of this, in which it eventually turned out that I was right, it only remained to me to return to Bruges, with the assurance from Dr. Jeune and several of the governors that I and nobody else should have the mastership when the appointment should be made. I returned to Bruges, passing one day with the dear Grants at Harrow, and an evening with my brother Anthony in London by the way, and reached the Château d’Hondt on the 15th of October, to find my father very much worse than I had left him. He was in bed, and was attended by the Dr. Herbout of whom I have before spoken. But he was too evidently drawing towards his end; and after much suffering breathed his last in the afternoon of the 23rd of October, 1835. On the 25th I followed his body to his grave, close to that of my brother Henry, in the cemetery outside the Catherine Gate of the town.