and heads of house-sparrows, variegated with embroideries made of the wings and heads and tails of tomtits. Picture a great grey curtain with patterns in yellow and blue. The patterns represented wheels, circles, stars, arabesques,—in fact every sort of fantastic figure a morbid fancy could frame out of the bodies and legs and heads and beaks of birds.
In the intervening spaces between the different patterns were cats' heads fastened against the wall, with open mouths, wrinkled cheeks and sparkling eyes; each head had its accompanying fore-paws crossed below it, like the death's heads and cross-bones you see on tombstones.
The heads had inscriptions above each conceived in such terms as these:
MISOUF,—condemned to suffer the penalty of death, on Jan. 10th, 1846, for having injured two Goldfinches and a Tomtit.
THE DOCTOR,—Condemned to suffer the penalty of death, on July 7th, 1847, for having stolen a sausage from the fryingpan.
BLÜCHER,—condemned to suffer the penalty of death, June loth, 1848, for having drunk up a bowl of milk put on one side for my breakfast.
"Ah ha!" I observed, "so it seems your master, like our feudal Barons of old, claims the right of executing justice, high and low."
"Yes, sir, as you see; and he allows no appeal against his sentences. He says that if everybody did like him and destroyed all robbers, thieves and murderers, there would soon be left in the world none but gentle, well-behaved animals, and that mankind, only having good examples to copy, would then improve."
I bowed my acknowledgment of the possible truth of the axiom; I respect collections without understanding their motives. At Ghent I once visited an amateur who collected buttons. Well, at first glance it seemed a ridiculous fad, but the interest grew as you looked closer. He had classified his buttons chronologically into groups, from the IXth century downwards. The collection began with a button from the Royal robe of Charlemagne and ended with one from Napoleon's uniform. There were regimental buttons of every body of troops ever levied in France, from the Free Archers of Charles VH. to the Sharpshooters of Vincennes; there were buttons of wood, of lead, of copper, of zinc, silver buttons, gold buttons, ruby, emerald, diamond buttons. The intrinsic value of the collection as a whole was estimated at 100,000 francs, and had cost the owner perhaps 300,000 to get together.
In London I knew an Englishman who collected the ropes with which people had been hanged. He had travelled in all parts of the world and likewise kept in touch with a number of correspondents; by his own efforts and those of his agents he was in relation with the public executioners of the four quarters of the globe. Directly a man was hanged in Europe, Asia, Africa or America, the hangman cut a bit off the rope, and despatched it along with a certificate of authenticity to our collector, who in return forwarded him the price of his packet. One of his ropes had cost him a hundred pounds sterling; true it was the one which had had the honour of strangling Sultan Selim III.,—an event in connexion with which English diplomacy, as all the world knows, had not been perfectly above suspicion.
I had just finished copying Blücher's epitaph, the cat who drank the milk, when half-past nine struck at St. Gudule's. We had barely half an hour left to catch the train for Antwerp; so I added my gratuity to what Biard had already given the man on our entrance, and we sallied out at a run from this city of dead fowl.
Our guide expressed his gratitude by hopping with us as far as the door, whence he followed us with his eyes twisting his neck in his own peculiar fashion the while, till he lost sight of us at the turning of the street. We reached the station just as the locomotive was giving its final whistle.
CHAPTER II
GAUFRES AND GHERKINS
WE arrived at Antwerp at eleven Not to miss the boat, which sailed at noon, we had breakfast on the Quay right opposite where the vessel lay. By midday we were all aboard, and at five minutes after the hour we started, under a fine, gentle, penetrating rain that I take to be a speciality of Antwerp, for I have
