[*] Flanders was parcelled into three divisions; of which Eastern
    Flanders, capital Ghent, and Western Flanders, capital Bruges, are
    two provinces of Belgium.  French Flanders, capital Lille, is the
    Departement du Nord of France.  Douai, about twenty miles from
    Lille, is the chief town of the arrondissement du Nord.

After assimilating, by constant sober regulation of conduct, the products and the ideas of its masters and its neighbors, this country of Flanders, by nature so tame and devoid of poetry, worked out for itself an original existence, with characteristic manners and customs which bear no signs of servile imitation.  Art stripped off its ideality and produced form alone.  We may seek in vain for plastic grace, the swing of comedy, dramatic action, musical genius, or the bold flight of ode and epic.  On the other hand, the people are fertile in discoveries, and trained to scientific discussions which demand time and the midnight oil.  All things bear the ear-mark of temporal enjoyment.  There men look exclusively to the thing that is:  their thoughts are so scrupulously bent on supplying the wants of this life that they have never risen, in any direction, above the level of this present earth.  The sole idea they have ever conceived of the future is that of a thrifty, prosaic statecraft:  their revolutionary vigor came from a domestic desire to live as they liked, with their elbows on the table, and to take their ease under the projecting roofs of their own porches.

The consciousness of well-being and the spirit of independence which comes of prosperity begot in Flanders, sooner than elsewhere, that craving for liberty which, later, permeated all Europe.  Thus the compactness of their ideas, and the tenacity which education grafted on their nature made the Flemish people a formidable body of men in the defence of their rights.  Among them nothing is half-done,—­neither houses, furniture, dikes, husbandry, nor revolutions; and they hold a monopoly of all that they undertake.  The manufacture of linen, and that of lace, a work of patient agriculture and still more patient industry, are hereditary like their family fortunes.  If we were asked to show in human form the purest specimen of solid stability, we could do no better than point to a portrait of some old burgomaster, capable, as was proved again and again, of dying in a commonplace way, and without the incitements of glory, for the welfare of his Free-town.

Yet we shall find a tender and poetic side to this patriarchal life, which will come naturally to the surface in the description of an ancient house which, at the period when this history begins, was one of the last in Douai to preserve the old-time characteristics of Flemish life.