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124 the clattering of the -wooden shoes on the pavement. However, that "I is I," I feel too surely at this moment, having just mounted the tower of the Cathedral, 613 steps: a cathedral built in 1300, and eighty-three years in the building. The tower is beautifully wrought. Charles V. said of it, it should be kept in a case, and Napoleon compared it to Mechlin lace. If these great people have not the fairy gift of dropping pearls from their lips, their words are gold for the guides that haunt these showplaces. We paid two francs for the above jeux d'espritmind game [sic] to a young ciceroni, who could speak intelligibly French, Spanish, English, Italian, and Flemish of course, but could not write, and had never heard of America!!

We saw from the gallery of the tower to a distance (on the word of our guide) of eighty miles; The atmosphere was perfectly transparent, undimmed by a particle of smoke from the city; a fact accounted for by the fuel used being exclusively a species of hard coal. It is worth while to mount a pinnacle in a country like this, where there is no eminence to intercept the view. You see the Scheldt, which is about as wide as the Hudson at Albany, winding far, far away through a sea of green and waving corn, and towers, churches, and villages innumerable. The view gave us New-World people