A DOG OF FLANDERS. 55

his life, and it was this. Antwerp,
as all the world knows, is full at
every turn of old piles of stones, dark
and ancient and majestic, standing
in crooked courts, jammed against
gate-ways and taverns, rising by the
water’s edge, with bells ringing above
them in the air, and ever and again
out of their arched doors a swell
of music pealing. There they re-
main, the grand old sanctuaries of the
past, shut in amidst the squalor, the
hurry, the crowds, the unloveliness,
and the commerce of the modern
world, and all day long the clouds
drift and the birds circle and the
winds sigh around them, and beneath
- the earth at their feet there sleeps —
RUBENS.