Place de la Monnaie, whom I suspected to have
come over on an excursion trip to some international
congress then being held in the capital of
Kine Leopold. Him I discreetly avoided;
which was pleasant and convenient. True, when
I had been in Brussels about a month I came
suddenly across a real friend, who was camping
out at the suburb of St. Josse-ten-Noode. I
was obliged to go and dine with him and make
believe to be intimate with his family; but I
soon contrived to get up a snug little quarrel
with my friend—a querelle d'Allemand, or rather
de Belge, for we neither of us knew precisely
what it was about; and then, after we had
abused each other with the worst grace in the
world, I was quite alone, which was delightfully
humanising. At last it pleased Mynheer van Prig
—and be hanged to him—to shunt himself across
my solitary path.

For a time I enjoyed all the pleasures of a Low
Dutch Zimmerman. It was so comfortable to be
alone. I wouldn't have anything to do with the
bad high-priced dinners at the spurious French
restaurants in the Galerie St. Hubert, or the
jangling tables d'hôte at the great hotels; not I.
But I dined royally in the Flemish manner at a
little eating-house in a back street, that might
have been the main cabin in a Greenland whaler,
so greasy was it, and where I had six courses of
adipose matter, any quantity of black bread and
pickled vegetables, a plank of cheese of which
the smell alone would have blown up Waltham
Abbey if there were cheese instead of powder
mills there, and a white wash-hand jug full of
faro beer, such as would, for its sourness, have
set all the grinders of the Giant Bolivorax, to say
nothing of the teeth of a whole Port Royal full
of ground sharks, on edge—all for ninepence half-
penny. And it didn't make me bilious. I hadn't
turned the corner of thirty years then. I played
billiards or dominoes every night with people I
didn't know, and liked to play with Walloons
rather than with Flemings; for the reason, you
see, that I understood a little Flemish, and that
the Walloon tongue is one which nobody on earth,
save the natives and deaf and dumb people, can
speak. Sometimes, I went to the Maison des
Brasseurs on the Grande Place, and breakfasted
on a "beuifsteackox," the orthography by printed
placard adopted for the edible known in the
country as a beefsteak. Sometimes I smoked a
pipe on a dingy estaminet opposite the corner of
the Rue de L'Etuve, and, looking upon the famous
little Mannekin, wished I could be appointed his
valet de chambre to dress him in his three suits
a year—how do they get his netherstocks on?—
and his cross of St. Louis; or that I could be his
homme d'affaires to manage his handsome
revenues in a snug bureau panelled with walnut-wood;
and I wondered who the rich old maids and
burgomasters could have been who had left legacies
and yearly "rentes" to the "plus ancien bourgeois
de Bruxelles." A great haunt of mine was
a half-English tavern off the Montagne de la
Cour, whither grooms, and broken-down baronets,
and quarter-pay captains, and English raffs of
every description, came to read the Times, and
talk about horses and bills, and drink the best
Belgian substitute for English gin-and-water.
And then I went home to some nice desolate
quarters I had at a hairdresser's shop in the Rue
de la Montagne. The hairdresser was a blind
man, and his apprentice used to make faces at
him in the intervals of dressing those wigs on
the dummies. The hairdresser's wife was
ordinarily in tears; when her eyes were dry, she was
in a storming passion, and thrashing her children
with a "martinet." I used to sing God save the
Queen, in the endeavour to drown their yells,
which disturbed the digestion of the six courses
and the sour faro. My bedroom was like Mr.
Punch's show; it was tall, narrow, and dark,
and had but a half door covered with green baize.

I had a charcoal stove in my sitting apartment,
and nearly managed to asphyxiate myself with
the fumes thereof. I had an effigy of a black
Madonna with three hands, and a black bambino
set in silvered copper, with a lamp swinging before
it which had come from Kieff, and a fur coat that
weighed about half a hundred-weight, and a pair
of boots four feet high, lined with sheepskin,
and with which I used to compare notes at night.
I had a quantity of books in half a dozen languages
—"Ave, Tauchnitz! Imperator, te saluto!"—on
the floor, and a quantity of loose tobacco on the
furniture generally; and I got up and went to
bed at all hours; and, if I hadn't paid my rent in
advance, I think the landlady must have imagined
that I was mad. I had my complaints against her,
too; for I am sure she made the pomatum in the
vessels she used for cooking the dinner; and the
mingled odour of bear's-grease and cabbage-soup
was dreadful. I was to do a great deal of writing,
and bought a large stock of pens and paper, and
seven kinds of ink. I meant to paint some
pictures illustrating recent foreign pilgrimages of
my own, and I laid in large quantities of pigments
and hog's-hair brushes; but I don't think I
either wrote or painted much. The major part
of my time at home was devoted to smoking,
reading, and keeping a minutely accurate journal
of the things I hadn't done. A young musical
gentleman once came to my hermitage—which
was on the fourth floor—with a letter of
introduction from England; but I leaped up at him
like a smoky Frankenstein, and soon gave that
peaceable but obtrusive fiddler his quietus. Oh,
it was a jovial time, a merry time! So merry,
indeed, that I was often uncertain in my mind
as to whether I should jump for joy and sing
continual Te Deums, or whether I should pitch
myself out of the fourth floor window, and dash
my brains out against the flags of the Rue de la
Montagne.

I owed no money in Brussels—and how,
indeed, anybody can get into debt where rent and
food are so cheap, and where cigars are three for
a penny, puzzles me. Else I might have become
acquainted with the swift and sharp Debtor and
Creditor Law of Belgium, and have mingled with