Page:The life of Captain Sir Richard F. Burton (IA b21778401).pdf/88

58 Mrs. D'Aguilar, who with two of her daughters were determined to see the Rhine. One of the girls was Emily, who died soon. The other was Eliza, who married a clergyman of the name of Pope, and whose son, Lieutenant Pope of the 24th Queen's, died gallantly at Isandula; though surrounded by numbers, he kept firing his revolver and wounding his enemies, till he received a mortal wound by an assegai in the breast. This was on January 22nd, 1879. In the end of 1875 he came to Folkestone, to take leave of my wife and me, who were going out to India. We both liked him very much.

In those days travellers took the steamer from London Bridge, dropped quietly down the Thames, and, gaining varied information about the places on both sides of it, dined as usual on a boiled leg of mutton and caper sauce, and roast ribs of beef with horse-radish, and slept as best they could in the close boxes called berths or on deck; if the steamer was in decent order, and there was not too much head wind, they could be in the Scheldt next morning.

Our little party passed a day at Antwerp, which looked beautiful from the river. The Cathedral tower and the tall roofs and tapering spires of the churches around it made a matchless group. We visited the fortifications, which have lately done such good work, and we had an indigestion of Rubens, who appeared so gross and so fleshy after the Italian school. Mrs. D'Aguilar was dreadfully scandalized, when, coming suddenly into a room, she found her two nephews at romps with a pretty little soubrette, whose short petticoats enabled her to deliver the sharpest possible kicks, while she employed her hands in vigorously defending her jolly red cheeks. The poor lady threw up her hands and her eyes to heaven when she came suddenly upon this little scene, and she was even more shocked when she found that her escort had passed the Sunday evening in the theatre.

From Antwerp we travelled to Bruges, examined the belfry, heard the chimes, and then went on to Cologne. A marvellous old picturesque place it was, with its combination of old churches, crumbling walls, gabled houses, and the narrowest and worst-paved streets we had ever seen. The old Cathedral in those days was not finished, and threatened never to be finished. Still there was the grand solitary tower, with the mystical-looking old crane on the top, and a regular garden growing out of the chinks and crannies of the stonework. Coleridge's saying about Cologne, was still emphatically true in those days, and all travellers had recourse to "Jean Marie Farina Gegenüber." What a change there is now, with that hideous Gothic railway bridge, and its sham battlements, and loopholes to defend nothing, with its hideous cast-iron turret over the centre of the church, where the old architect had intended a