of these continental towns? How is it that, with all his attempts to disguise himself in the beard and moustache, and slouched hat of the country, he cannot escape detection? Do what he will to look as if he were to the manner born, the instinct of these astonishing half-naked imps in wooden shoes will find him out the moment he shows his face on the pavement. While you are thinking out this riddle I will go on with my old Flemish town.
In the gorgeous Plantagenet times, when table-cloths were as costly as coats of mail, one of the distinguishing luxuries of the great English families was the grand piece of diaper which was spread out in honour of their guests on high-days and holidays. Well—it was from this remote town that all that beautiful starry diaper came, and took its name; as you may perceive by the simple corruption of d’Ypres into diaper. I feel a special interest in the place on that account. For an Englishman to make a journey to Ypres is like paying a visit to the birth-place or residence of an ancestor, of whose name, deeds, and whereabouts one’s family has preserved dim traditions, which are growing dimmer every day. Who knows in what houses yet standing in these antique streets some of our progenitors, great cloth-merchants of the city of London, may not have been lodged in the reigns of the Henrys and Edwards, when they made solemn commercial pilgrimages hither to effect purchases in woollen stuffs, tapestry, and the like, to be afterwards displayed and sold at stupendous profit, in the marts about Chepe and Aldgate? Who knows but that in the very room in which I am now writing, in the Tête d’Or, looking out into the broad, cheerful Rue de Lille, terminating with the belfry of the old Halle, backed by the towers of the cathedral, some emissary of Wolsey’s may not have been quartered, while he was executing an express mission on Church affairs under the orders of the Cardinal? For, amongst the historical circumstances which connect us, English, directly with this place, is the fact that Wolsey was once Bishop of Ypres, and exercised from the banks of the Thames the same ghostly powers that are now wielded by a venerable gentleman who resides here on the Grand Place, in a large white house, with highly suggestive green verandahs, and a porte-cochère, large enough to admit the Lord Mayor’s coach, with the trumpeters on each side.
How the cloth-merchants managed their journeys from London to this place in the middle ages, considering what the tracks and the vehicles must have been in those days, is past conjecture. I can only say that, with all our improved resources in the way of locomotion, our net-works of rails and bye-roads, and our endless adaptations of science to practical purposes, it cost me many laborious researches in the abysses of Bradshaw, before I was able to solve the problem how to get to Ypres without a waste of time, which nobody can afford in the nineteenth century. However, to cut a long story short, my route was as follows:—
From Calais I took the railroad to Hazebrouck, a distance of twenty-five miles. Of Hazebrouck itself I was utterly ignorant, nor was I fortunate enough to hit upon anybody who could tell me anything about it. The excursion was a leap in the dark. There might, or might not, be roads from Hazebrouck, or Hazebrouck might be only a station without even a village attached to it, as you often see in France a fine white-barred gate inserted in a ragged hedge, with a mud-track inside leading nowhere. The expedition to Hazebrouck was a desperate speculation, founded entirely on the position of the place on the map, from which I inferred that there might be a way direct over the frontier, and across the country to Ypres: trusting to the chapter of accidents, to which travellers owe so many inestimable obligations, for a conveyance of some kind to take us on. We—two in number—were the sole passengers dropped at the solitary station of Hazebrouck; and as the train instantly swept on, I felt that our situation was very much like that of a couple of travellers who had been left behind by a caravan on the route over the Great Desert. The few officials who loitered about the place, appeared, for lack of occupation, to be overcome by aa infectious drowsiness, such as we have seen ilustrated by the “Land of Nod,” or the “Regions of Slumber,” in a London pantomime; and the only signs of work-a-day life exhibited on the somnolent platform were by two rustic porters in blue smock-frocks, who had come down to the station on the look-out for customers, from the two rival hostelries of the hamlet, which we conjectured to lie somewhere amongst a cluster of trees we could discern at a distance. In vain they solicited the honour of being permitted to take charge of our baggage, which we left at the station, and proceeded on foot in the direction of the trees. Guided by a few straggling huts, and the word “octroi,” half-obliterated, on a crazy wooden toll-house, with the door sealed up, and followed by an admiring cortège of urchins, who opened their mouths and eyes at us as if they had never seen a stranger before, and twisted their fingers painfully to suppress their emotions, we made our way at last into the bourg, or village of Hazebrouck. Wonderfully still, and ancient, and petrified, we found it; composed of strange, rickety, stony streets, all leading into a vast central Place, having on one side a state building, transparent with long narrow windows through and through, enclosing under one roof the Town-Hall, the Market, the Palais de Justice, Bureau de la Place, and I know not what else. Hardly the sound of a foot-fall broke the sleepy silence that brooded over the spot, except the lazy clatter of the two porters, as they returned across the great square, trundling home their empty trucks at a dog’s pace, to the St. George and Les Trois Chevaux. Our object was to procure a voiture, and great was our consternation, upon making due inquiries, to discover that there was only one regular travelling-carriage, properly so called, in the town, and that it was gone for the day to Ypres, the very place to which we wanted to go. What was to be done? We looked in blank despair at the gay façades of the two hotels, which stood close to each other in the great Place, opposite to the sprightly state building. The more we contemplated their lively aspect, the lower our spirits sank at the possible prospect of being doomed to put up at one or other of them for