standing ever so still, looking through the great gates of the choir at the twinkling lights, and listening to the distant chants of the priests performing the service, when a sweet chorus from the organ-loft broke out behind me overhead, and I turned round.  My friend the drum-major ecclesiastic was down upon me in a moment.  “Do not turn your back to the altar during divine service,” says he, in very intelligible English.  I take the rebuke, and turn a soft right-about face, and listen awhile as the service continues.  See it I cannot, nor the altar and its ministrants.  We are separated from these by a great screen and closed gates of iron, through which the lamps glitter and the chant comes by gusts only.  Seeing a score of children trotting down a side aisle, I think I may follow them.  I am tired of looking at that hideous old pulpit with its grotesque monsters and decorations.  I slip off to the side aisle; but my friend the drum-major is instantly after me—­almost I thought he was going to lay hands on me.  “You mustn’t go there,” says he; “you mustn’t disturb the service.”  I was moving as quietly as might be, and ten paces off there were twenty children kicking and clattering at their ease.  I point them out to the Swiss.  “They come to pray,” says he.  “You don’t come to pray, you—­” “When I come to pay,” says I, “I am welcome,” and with this withering sarcasm, I walk out of church in a huff.  I don’t envy the feelings of that beadle after receiving point blank such a stroke of wit.

Leo Belgicus.—­Perhaps you will say after this I am a prejudiced critic.  I see the pictures in the cathedral fuming under the rudeness of that beadle, or at the lawful hours and prices, pestered by a swarm of shabby touters, who come behind me chattering in bad English, and who would have me see the sights through their mean, greedy eyes.  Better see Rubens any where than in a church.  At the Academy, for example, where you may study him at your leisure.  But at church?—­I would as soon ask Alexandre Dumas for a sermon.  Either would paint you a martyrdom very fiercely and picturesquely—­writhing muscles, flaming coals, scowling captains and executioners, swarming groups, and light, shade, color most dexterously brilliant or dark; but in Rubens I am admiring the performer rather than the piece.  With what astonishing rapidity he travels over his canvas; how tellingly the cool lights and warm shadows are made to contrast and relieve each other; how that blazing, blowsy penitent in yellow satin and glittering hair carries down the stream of light across the picture!  This is the way to work, my boys, and earn a hundred florins a day.  See!  I am as sure of my line as a skater of making his figure of eight! and down with a sweep goes a brawny arm or a flowing curl of drapery.  The figures arrange themselves as if by magic.  The paint-pots are exhausted in furnishing brown shadows.  The pupils look wondering on, as the master careers