Ghent is gloomy, whereas Bruges is melancholy, a different and a finer attribute. I have had terrible, devastating adventures in the restaurants of Ghent, and the one first-class monument there is the medieval castle of the counts of Flanders, an endless field for sociological speculation, but transcendency ugly and depressing. Ghent is a modern town in an old suit of clothes, and its inhabitants are more formidably Belgian than those of any other large city of Flanders. I speak not of the smaller industrial places, where Belgianism is ferocious and terrible.

At Bruges, water-colors being duly accomplished, we went straight to Notre Dame, where there was just enough light left for us to gaze upon Michelangelo’s “Virgin and Child,” a major work. Then to the streets and lesser canals. I found changes in the Bruges of my youth. Kinematographs, amid a conflagration of electricity, were to be expected, for no show-city in Europe has been able to keep them out. Do they not enliven and illumine the ground floors of some of the grandest renaissance palaces in Florence? But there were changes more startling than the advent kinematographs.

Incandescent gas-mantles had replaced the ordinary burners in the street-lamps of the town! In another fifty years the corporation of Bruges will be using electricity.

Still more remarkable, excursion motor-boats were running on the canals, and at the improvised landing-stages were large signs naming Bruges “The Venice of the North.” I admit that my feelings were hurt—not by the motor-boats, but by the signs. Bruges is no more the Venice of the North, than Venice is the Bruges of the South.

We allowed the soft melancholy of Bruges to descend upon us and penetrate us, as the motorboats ceased to run and the kinematographs grew more brilliant in the deepening night. We had to dine, and all the restaurants of the town were open to us. Impossible to keep away from the Grande Place and the belfry, still incessantly chattering about the time of day. Impossible not to look with an excusable sentimentality at the HÔtel du Panier d’Or, which in youth was the prince of hotels, with the fattest landlord in the world, and thousands of mosquitos ready among its bed-hangings to assist the belfry-chimes in destroying sleep. The Panier d’Or was the only proper hotel for the earnest art-loving tourist who could carry all his luggage and was firmly resolved not to spend more than seven francs a day at the outside. At the Panier d’Or one was sure to encounter other travelers who took both art and life seriously.

No, we would not dine at the Panier d’Or, because we would not disturb our memories. We glanced like ghosts of a past epoch at its exterior, and we slipped into the cafÉ restaurant next door, and were served by a postulant boy waiter who had everything to learn about food and human nature, but who was a nice boy. And after dinner, almost saturated with the exquisite melancholy of the Grande Place, we were too enchanted to move. We drank coffee and other things, and lingered until all the white cloths were removed from the tables; and the long, high room became a cafÉ simply. A few middle-aged male habituÉs wandered in separately,—four in all,—and each sat apart and smoked and drank beer. The mournfulness was sweet and overwhelming. It was like chloroform. The reflection that each of these sad, aging men had a home and an intimitÉ somewhere in the spacious, transformed, shabby interiors of Bruges, that each was a living soul with aspirations and regrets, this reflection was excruciating in its blend of forlornness and comedy.

A few more habituÉs entered, and then a Frenchman and a young Frenchwomen appeared on a dais at the back of the cafÉ and opened a piano. They were in correct drawing-room costume, with none of the eccentricities of the cafe-chantant, and they produced no effect whatever on the faces or in the gestures of the habituÉs, They performed. He sang; she sang; he played; she played. Just the common songs and airs of the Parisian music-halls, vulgar, but more inane than vulgar, The young woman was agreeable, with the large, red mouth which is the index of a comfortable, generous, and good-natured disposition They sang and played a long time. Nobody budged; nobody smiled. Certainly we did not; in a contest of phlegm Englishmen can, it is acknowledged, hold their own. Most of the habituÉs doggedly read newspapers, but at intervals there was a momentary dull applause. The economic basis of the entertainment was not apparent to us. The prices of food and drink were very moderate, and no collection was made by or on behalf of the artists.

At length, when melancholy ran off us instead of being absorbed, because we had passed the saturation-point, we rose and departed. Yes, incandescent-mantles and motor-boats were not the only changes in Bruges. And in the cafÉ adjoining the one we had left a troupe of girls in white were performing gaily to a similar audience of habituÉs. We glimpsed them through the open door. And in front of the kinematograph a bell was ringing loudly and continuously to invite habituÉs, and no habituÉs were responding. It was all extremely mysterious. The chimes of the belfry flung their strident tunes across the sky, and the thought of these and of the habituÉs gave birth in us to a suspicion that perhaps, after all, Bruges had not changed.

We moved away out of the Grande Place into the maze of Bruges toward the Quai Spinola, our footsteps echoing along empty streets and squares of large houses the fronts of which showed dim and lofty rooms inhabited by the historical past and also no doubt by habituÉs. And after much wandering I had to admit that I was lost in Bruges, a city which I was supposed to know like my birthplace. And at the corner of a street, beneath an incandescent-mantle, we had to take out a map and unfold it and peer at it just as if we had belonged to the lowest rank of tourists.

As we submitted ourselves to this humiliation, the carillon of the belfry suddenly came to us over a quarter of a mile of roofs. Not the clockwork chimes now, but the carillonneur himself playing on the bells, a bravura piece, delicate and brilliant. The effect was ravishing, as different from that of the clockwork chimes as a piano from a barrel-organ. All the magic of Bruges was reawakened in its pristine force. Bruges was no more a hackneyed rendezvous for cheap trippers and amateur painters and poverty-stricken English bourgeois and their attendant chaplains. It was the miraculous Bruges of which I had dreamed before I had ever even seen the place—just that.

Having found out where we were in relation to the Quai Spinola, we folded up the map and went forward. The carillon ceased, and began again, reaching us in snatches over the roofs in the night wind. We passed under the shadows of rococo churches, the faÇades and interiors of which are alike neglected by those who take their pleasures solely according to the instructions of guide-books, and finally we emerged out of the maze upon a long lake, pale bluish-gray in the gloom. And this lake was set in a frame of pale bluish-gray houses with stepwise gables, and by high towers, and by a ring of gas-lamps, all sleeping darkly. And on the lake floated the Velsa, like the phantom of a ship, too lovely to be real, and yet real. It was the most magical thing.

We could scarcely believe that there was our yacht right in the midst of the town. This was the same vessel that only a little earlier had rounded Cape Gris-Nez in a storm, and suffered no damage whatever. Proof enough of the advantage of the barge-build, with a light draft, and heavy lee-boards for use with a beam wind when close-hauled. Some yachtsmen, and expert yachtsmen, too, are strongly against the barge. But no ordinary yacht of the Velsas size could have scraped into that lake by the Quai Spinola and provided us with that unique sensation. The Velsa might have been designed specially for the background of Bruges. She fitted it with exquisite perfection.

And the shaft of light slanting up from her forecastle hatch rendered her more domestic than the very houses around, which were without exception dark and blind, and might have been abandoned. We went gingerly aboard across the narrow, yielding gangway, and before turning in gazed again at the silent and still scene. Not easy to credit that a little way off the kinematograph was tintinnabulating for custom, and a Parisian couple singing and playing, and a troupe of white-frocked girls coarsely dancing.