After some personal matters he continued:—­

“I don’t really know what to say to you.  I am in a town which, for aught I know, may be very gay.  I don’t know a living soul in it.  We have not a single acquaintance in the place, and we glory in the fact.  There is something rather sublime in thus floating on a single spar in the wide sea of a populous, busy, fuming, fussy world like this.  At any rate it is consonant to both our tastes.  You may suppose, however, that I find it rather difficult to amuse my friends out of the incidents of so isolated an existence.  Our daily career is very regular and monotonous.  Our life is as stagnant as a Dutch canal.  Not that I complain of it,—­on the contrary, the canal may be richly freighted with merchandise and be a short cut to the ocean of abundant and perpetual knowledge; but, at the same time, few points rise above the level of so regular a life, to be worthy of your notice.  You must, therefore, allow me to meander along the meadows of commonplace.  Don’t expect anything of the impetuous and boiling style.  We go it weak here.  I don’t know whether you were ever in Brussels.  It is a striking, picturesque town, built up a steep promontory, the old part at the bottom, very dingy and mouldy, the new part at the top, very showy and elegant.  Nothing can be more exquisite in its way than the grande place in the very heart of the city, surrounded with those toppling, zigzag, ten-storied buildings bedizened all over with ornaments and emblems so peculiar to the Netherlands, with the brocaded Hotel de Ville on one side, with its impossible spire rising some three hundred and seventy feet into the air and embroidered to the top with the delicacy of needle- work, sugarwork, spider-work, or what you will.  I haunt this place because it is my scene, my theatre.  Here were enacted so many deep tragedies, so many stately dramas, and even so many farces, which have been familiar to me so long that I have got to imagine myself invested with a kind of property in the place, and look at it as if it were merely the theatre with the coulisses, machinery, drapery, etc., for representing scenes which have long since vanished, and which no more enter the minds of the men and women who are actually moving across its pavements than if they had occurred in the moon.  When I say that I knew no soul in Brussels I am perhaps wrong.  With the present generation I am not familiar.  ‘En revanche,’ the dead men of the place are my intimate friends.  I am at home in any cemetery.  With the fellows of the sixteenth century I am on the most familiar terms.  Any ghost that ever flits by night across the moonlight square is at once hailed by me as a man and a brother.  I call him by his Christian name at once.  When you come out of this place, however, which, as I said, is in the heart of the town,—­the antique gem in the modern setting,—­you may go either up or down.  If you go down,