Brussels itself, as already intimated, is an exceedingly pleasant city for a more or less prolonged stay; and, owing at once to the admirable system of “Rundreise” tickets that are issued by the State railways at an uncommonly low price, to the rather dubious quality of the hotels in some of the smaller towns, and to the cardinal fact that Brussels is a centre from which most of the other great cities of Belgium—­Malines, Ghent, Antwerp, and Liege, not to mention smaller towns of absorbing interest, such as Mons, Namur, Hal, Tirlemont, Leau, and Soignies—­may be easily visited, more or less completely, in the course of a single day—­owing to all these facts many people will be glad to make this pleasant city their centre, or headquarters, for the leisurely exploration of most of Belgium, with the exception of the more distant and out-of-the-way districts of West Flanders and the Ardennes.  All the places enumerated are thoroughly worth visiting, but obviously only the more important can be dealt with more than just casually here.  Mons, on a hill overlooking the great coalfield of the Borinage, with its strange pyramidal spoil-heaps, is itself curiously free from the dirt and squalor of an English colliery town; and equally worth visiting for the sake of its splendid cathedral of St. Wandru, the richly polychromatic effect of whose interior, due to the conjunction of deep red-brick vaulting with the dark blue of its limestone capitals and piers, illustrates another pleasant phase of Belgian ecclesiastical architecture, as well as for the sake of a contest, almost of yesterday, that has added new and immortal laurels to the genius of British battle.  Tournai, on the upper Scheldt, or Escaut, is remarkable for the heavy Romanesque nave of its cathedral, which is built of the famous local black marble, as well as for its remarkable central cluster of five great towers.  Soignies (in Flemish Zirick), roughly half-way between Mons and Brussels, and probably little visited, has a sombre old abbey church, of St. Vincent Maldegaire, that was built in the twelfth century, and that is enriched inside with such a collection of splendidly carved classical woodwork—­ stalls, misericordes, and pulpit—­as you will scarcely find elsewhere even in Belgium.  The pulpit in particular is wonderful, with its life-sized girl supporters, with their graceful and lightly poised figures, and pure and lovely faces.  Namur, strangely enough, has really nothing of antiquity outside the doors of its Archaeological Museum, but is worth a visit if only for the pleasure of promenading streets which, if almost wholly modern, are unusually clean and bright.  Tirlemont, again, has two old churches that will not delay you long, though Notre Dame de Lac has remarkably fine confessionals of the dawn of the seventeenth century, and though the splendid brass-work of the font and baptistery lectern at St. Germains would alone be worth a visit; but Leau, for which Tirlemont is the junction, is so quaint and curious