away from the theater of demolitions, the progress of which would have afflicted him too keenly.
Chance had willed it that he should witness this devastation on the very day when he had just attended the departure of his friends. The contrast between the, activity of the docks and the ruin that was beginning to border the river was not of a nature to console him.
At the moment when the tumbrils were carrying away the plaster, the broken stone and the materials of the house to take them to far distant dumps. The Gina was also carrying away as much refuse material, good-for-nothings, cumbersome parasites, workers without work, peasants without land, the broke, the down and out, poor devils from the land and business.
For many of the people and of the Antwerpians of the old school, it was as if the proud Scheldt was repudiating his first wife. He was replacing old Antwerp by a harsh stepmother bringing new unreasonableness and customs, a foreign language favorable to the breeding of other customs. She was gradually repudiating the children of the first marriage-bed, brutally proscribing the descendents of the primitive stock, in order to draw near her arrogant bastards, to substitute in the paternal favor a population of mongrels and foreigners.
There had even been talk, in the meetings of the Regency, of tearing down the Steen, the old castle, just as they had already torn down the Tour-Bleue and the Port Saint-Georges. In truth, they had damaged the admirable arch of triumph in spite of themselves. Had not these good idiots made up their minds to tear down the gate in numbering the quarters, block by block, as in a game of patience? But our eagles did not reckon with the work of centuries, and at this
