This lasted for four hours, when, reaching a country-house, the road turned suddenly at a right angle, and ran for near a mile through an avenue of trees, bounded by open meadows.  At the termination of this avenue we dashed into the streets of a small, well-built, neat, and compact village, that contained about one hundred and fifty dwellings, besides three or four edifices of rather more than usual pretensions.  This was the celebrated Spa, a watering-place whose reputation was once co-extensive with civilization.

We drove to an inn, where we dined, but finding it crowded and uncomfortable.  I went out and hired a furnished house by the day, putting our own servants, with an assistant, in possession of the kitchen.  Next morning, perceiving that I had been too hasty, and that our lodgings were too confined, I discharged them and took a better.  We got a dining-room, two drawing-rooms, several bed-rooms, with offices, etc., all neat and well-furnished, for a Napoleon a day.  I mention these things as they serve to show you the facilities a traveller enjoys in this part of the world.  Nearly every house in Spa is to be had in this manner, fitted for the reception of guests, the proprietor occupying a small building adjoining, and usually keeping a shop, where wine and groceries may be had.  Servants can be engaged at any moment, and one is thus enabled to set up his own menage at an hour’s notice.  This mode is more economical for a large family, than living at an hotel, vastly more comfortable, and more respectable.  Dinners can be had from the taverns, if desired.  Francois being something of a cook, with the aid of the Spa assistant, we lived entirely within ourselves.  You will remember that in hiring the house by the day, I reserved the right to quit it at any moment.

Spa, like most other places that possess chalybeate waters, stands in the centre of a country that can boast but little of its fertility.  Still, time and cultivation have left it the character of pale verdure of which I have just spoken, and which serves for a time to please by its novelty.  The hue looked neither withered nor sickly, but it was rather that of young grasses.  It was a ghostly green.  The eye wanders over a considerable extent of naked fields, when one is on the steep wooded hills, under whose very brows the village is built, and I scarcely can recall a spot where a stronger impression of interminable vastness is left, than I felt while gazing at the illimitable swells of land that stretch away towards France.  The country is said to be in the mountains of the Ardennes, and once there was the forest through which the “Boar of Ardennes” was wont to roam; but of forest there is now none; and if there be a mountain, Spa must stand on its boundless summit.  High and broken hills do certainly appear, but, as a whole, it is merely an upland region.