It still rained, but we got a tilbury and drove out to see the battle-ground of Waterloo.  It was a dreary drive beside the wood of Soignes and through a part of it,—­that melancholy-looking forest of tall-stemmed beeches—­beech, beech, nothing but beech—­and through the Walloon villages—­Waterloo is one of them—­and through fields where wet women were at work, and over roads where dirty children by dozens were dabbling like ducks in the puddles.  At last we stopped at the village of Mont St. Jean, whence we walked through the slippery mud to the mound erected in the midst of the battle-field, and climbed to its top, overlooking a country of gentle declivities and hollows.  Here the various positions of the French and allied armies during the battle which decided the fate of an empire, were pointed out to us by a young Walloon who sold wine and drams in a shed beside the monument.  The two races which make up the population of Belgium are still remarkably distinct, notwithstanding the centuries which have elapsed since they occupied the same country together.  The Flemings of Teutonic origin, keep their blue eyes and fair hair, and their ancient language—­the same nearly as the Dutch of the sixteenth century.  The Walloons, a Celtic race, or Celtic mixed with Roman, are still known by their dark hair and black eyes, and speak a dialect derived from the Latin, resembling that of some of the French provinces.  Both languages are uncultivated, and the French has been adopted as the language of commerce and literature in Belgium.

If you would see a city wholly Flemish in its character, you should visit Antwerp, to which the railway takes you in an hour and a half.  The population here is almost without Walloon intermixture, and there is little to remind you of what you have seen in France, except the French books in the booksellers’ windows.  The arts themselves have a character of their own which never came across the Alps.  The churches, the interior of which is always carefully kept fresh with paint and gilding, are crowded with statues in wood, carved with wonderful skill and spirit by Flemish artists, in centuries gone by—­oaken saints looking down from pedestals, and Adam and Eve in the remorse of their first transgression supporting, by the help of the tree of knowledge and the serpent, a curiously wrought pulpit.  The walls are hung with pictures by the Flemish masters, wherever space can be found for them.  In the Cathedral, is the Descent from the Cross, by Rubens, which proves, what one might almost doubt who had only seen his pictures in the Louvre, that he was a true artist and a man of genius in the noblest sense of the term.

We passed two nights in Antwerp, and then went down the Scheldt in a steamer, which, in ten hours, brought us to Rotterdam, sometimes crossing an arm of the sea, and sometimes threading a broad canal.  The houses on each side of these channels, after we entered Holland, were for the most part freshly painted; the flat plains on each side protected by embankments, and streaked by long wide ditches full of water, and rows of pollard willows.  Windmills by scores, some grinding corn, but most of them pumping water out of the meadows and pouring it into the channel, stood on the bank and were swinging their long arms madly in a high wind.