THE RAG MARKET AT BRUGES.

upon the strings between the trees, with old coats and dresses. And on. the
ground, each upon her square of carpet, stood or sat the rag sellers.

There were old brass candlesticks, and coffee pots, and great bowls, and
kettles, and dogs for the fireplace ; heaps of wooden sabots, old iron, horse col-
Jars, crimson long-sleeved waistcoats, such as the peasants wear; blue cotton
pinafores for children, odds and ends of ribbon and silk and stuff, old caps and
hats, old china, old books — every kind of rubbish, useful and useless, mixed up to-
gether in the wildest confusion. All round there was a clatter of wooden shoes,
and a chatter of harsh Flemish voices. In the center of a dense group, a man
was shouting something with all the force of his lungs. The pilgrims caught
the words “ een penne” over and over again, and discovered that he was trying

   

—— Dy <VO
F ROBSYS oy
TAN IS abt,

~ XS
Se
me Aly

ee

  

 
 

   

“ CANDLESTICKS AND COFFEE POTS, BOWLS AND KETTLES.”?

‘to persuade the passers-by to invest in his miraculous stove blacking, which was
the finest and cheapest ever invented. The sun flashed through the leaves of
the lime-trees, and danced in flecks of golden light on the queer goods and their
queerly dressed venders. Birds sang overhead, and in the high-walled convent
garden across the canal. Anda brood of ducklings followed their plump fussy
mother in her wanderings on the water among great white water-lilies, that
opened their golden eyes under the shadows of houses three hundred years old.

The pilgrims stood watching the picturesque scene; the blue-and-red-coated
soldiers, the black-cloaked peasant women and black-veiled nuns, the red-
faced farmers, the milk women with their little carts full of brass milk cans and
drawn each by a wise big dog, the seller of bright-colored knitted goods which