We were working away, thankful that every one was too full of his own business to care to look at us, when suddenly a pleasant smell of burning made us wonder whether the municipality were trying to fumigate the town and overpower the very unsavory odors around us. Presently blacks began to settle on our sketch-books. Then burning morsels flew through the air, and, turning round, we saw that a quantity of bales standing on the quay twenty yards behind us were on fire. Half a dozen bystanders looked on with true Flemish phlegm. A woman in blue and gray, with yellow sabots, stood watching on a fallen mast. Then others began to arrive, and as the flames rose higher some slight interest arose with them. The gray woman turned and ran for the pompiers. The interest grew and spread among the gathering crowd. Soldiers just landing from the Tête de Flandre caught sight of the crackling flames and rushed towards them. Stevedores left the lading of their steamer, and, leaping across masts and spars, with sacks over their heads and their blue blouses puffed into balloons by the wind, rushed to the scene of action. M—— and I thought it prudent to retire to a street-corner, away from the turmoil.
Such a street! all in warm shade, with rich reds and grays and browns among its high-roofed houses. Out of the Fish-Market close by poured a motley crowd,—men in blue jerseys, men in red jerkins, men in shirt-sleeves, little lads in sailor-clothes with bright yellow sabots, women with yellow sabots and blue stockings, or yellow stockings and black sabots, or black shoes and pink stockings, women in three-cornered shawls, women in long black cloaks. The tardily-awakened interest had grown into intense excitement. Every one ran,—soldiers, ladies, porters, priests; and as we left the Quai Vandyck to go home, and looked up at the stone lace-work of the cathedral tower against the bright blue sky, the pompiers raced past us with their little hand-engine, to find that the fire had burnt itself out.
Too tired by our long day to walk any more, but unwilling to waste the evening in our rooms, we chartered a comfortable little carriage and drove down to the Port just after sunset. The cathedral tower stood stately and sombre against a pale-pink sky. Against this delicate background, too, we caught fantastic irregular outlines of old houses at every turn of the streets. The busy Quai Vandyck we now saw under a completely changed aspect. The pink of the upper sky melted into yellow, the yellow into a heavy blue-purple blending with the farther shore of the river. The bands of color, intensified by black masts and sails rising from yet blacker hulls lying under the bank, were reflected in the opalescent water; while fluttering pennons on a forest of fishing-boats looked, as M—— said, “like a shoal of minnows.”
As we drove along in the growing darkness the scene was weird and strange. We caught glimpses of black figures, with heavy burdens on their shoulders, rushing up and down gangways of loading steamers like the demons of some Walpurgisnacht, lighted by oil-cans flaming from their two spouts. Then came a street of ancient houses,—we could see only the steps of their gables against the sky,—and, instead of a roadway below, the street was full of water and ships, sails half furled, lights, red, green, and yellow, repeating themselves in long reflections amid the black boats on the smooth surface of the canal. Across the river steamer-lights crept to and fro. Low carts, with huge horses that brought to mind Paul Potter’s etching of “The Friesland Horse,” grazed past us. Then came a black mass,—the house of the Hanseatic League. Then great docks like the sea, stretching away infinitely into the darkness, a mysterious confusion of masts, spars, cordage, chimneys, lights, water, black hulls. On shore a tangle of carts and trollies standing horseless, barrels, cotton-bales, wool-sacks. A locomotive snorted past us in dangerous proximity, appearing one knew not from whence, disappearing again into the gloom. Electric lights flashed on ahead far up the line. We passed more huge warehouses, more canals, more narrow streets. Then the Port and its strange life, its flaming oil-cans, its murky darkness, were left behind, and we found ourselves back in nineteenth-century civilization, driving down the new Frenchified boulevards, with only the statue of David Teniers and the Italian facade of Rubens’s house to remind us where we were.
[ ART MUSEUMS OF DRESDEN.]
ELIZABETH PEAKE.
[“Pen Pictures of Europe,” by Elizabeth Peake, is amply worth reading by all who wish to gain a rapid acquaintance with what is worth seeing on that continent. Its interesting descriptions are so many and varied that choice among them is not easy to make, and we present what our traveller saw in Dresden and at Potsdam simply as examples of the whole.]
We have been to the picture-gallery. There were between two and three thousand pictures. There were Raphael, Holbein, Correggio, Titian, Carlo Dolce, Paul Veronese, Rubens, Rembrandt, Vandyke, Guido, Ruysdael, Wouvermans, Claude, Poussin, and I do not know who else; but I would give them all, and more besides, for the portraits of Charlemagne and Sigismund by Dürer, and the historical painting of the peace of Westphalia, with its forty-seven original portraits by Sandrart. I do really think that I have seen a million of paintings, and have come to the sad conclusion that I have precious little love for pictures,—for paintings.