Another instance of creole gratitude and fidelity is worth recording. A lady who had enjoyed wealth and luxury at home escaped the massacre, but arrived in America entirely destitute. Her feeble health required constant care and delicate food. She was accompanied in her flight by her faithful servant Fanny, who devoted herself to the care and comfort of her former mistress. Fanny rented a small brick house containing five rooms—two chambers, two rooms below and a kitchen. In the upper rooms she made her dear old godmother as comfortable as any lady could be, and when her duties called her elsewhere she placed another in attendance there. The constant piety of this excellent creole was an edifying sight. Fanny still lives, but her dear friend is no more: she believes firmly that they will again be united, to part no more.
One fact connected with these colored Creoles is worthy of mention. Although they have been living in this country for more than three-quarters of a century, they have never united themselves, as social beings, with any of our American negroes. They have treated them with kindness and politeness, helped them in poverty and visited them in sickness, but have never intermarried with them, never gone to their churches, never joined any of the various African societies so conspicuous on certain days of parade. Distinguished for their honesty, they have seldom appeared in the courts either as plaintiffs or defendants. Respected by all, they have never demanded social equality.
Scarcely a dozen of the colored creoles who originally emigrated from St. Domingo are now alive, but their descendants are numerous. They form a very worthy part of the community in which they live. They retain many of the traditionary qualities of their ancestors, and among the shiftless, dependent and often destitute negroes around them they are conspicuous for their industry, integrity and morality.
E.L.D.
GLIMPSES OF BRUSSELS.
To leave Paris for Brussels is to exchange excitement for tranquillity, a crowd for a few, the oppressive newness and vivacity of to-day for a mild animation tempered with a flavor of bygone ages. Brussels has been called a miniature Paris. I should rather consider her as the younger sister of the great city—less beautiful, less decked out, less accomplished, less versed in the ways of the world, yet keeping a certain freshness and virginity of aspect that is lacking in her more brilliant elder.
There is one thing that a foreign resident of Paris is apt to find very enjoyable in Brussels, and that is the absence of the eternal crowd that mars for many people a full enjoyment of the pleasant places of Paris. Her thronging millions overwhelm you on every festive day or joyous occasion. Any little outside show or attraction calls together in some restricted space the population of a small city. Thirty thousand people rushed to hear the Spanish students play on the guitar in the garden of the Tuileries. Twenty thousand go every Sunday to the Salon during the period that it remains open. One hundred thousand go out to the races on ordinary days, and twice that number attend the Grand Prix. Hence comes a famine of conveyances and of seats, and a plethora of companions that are far from being uniformly agreeable.
In Brussels one has enough of human surroundings. There is no lack of companionship in her gardens, her galleries, her streets and her parks. She is not a solitude, as are some of the dead cities of Italy and Germany or some of the minor provincial towns in Belgium and France. The influence of her three hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants is very comfortably apparent. But where Paris pours forth her tens of thousands, Brussels sends out some hundreds. Hence there is always room and to spare. And she is well-to-do in the world, is this pretty capital of Belgium. She is growing and thriving, and wears every mark of an active and contented prosperity. New and handsome streets meet the view on every side. Foremost among these is the elegant Avenue Louise, named after the late queen of the Belgians, which leads out to the spacious and lovely Bois de la Cambre, a second Bois de Boulogne, omitting the traces of the siege. The Avenue Louise reminds me very much of South Broad street in Philadelphia. It forms an almost unbroken row of elegant private residences, extending for full two miles to the very gate of the Bois. The centre of the roadway is macadamized and bordered with rows of trees, thus forming a charming road to the Bois for the private carriages of the Belgian aristocracy.
The royal family of Belgium appear but little in public. A series of family misfortunes, combined with the ill-health of the king, has induced them to live in comparative retirement. Of the children of the late king Leopold, but three survive, the present king, the Count de Flandres and the luckless empress Charlotte. The last, still sunk in a state of hopeless insanity, inhabits the Château de Tervueren. The king, with his wife and family, passes most of his time at the Château de Laeken. He is a great sufferer from a disease which has attacked one of his legs. The queen, an Austrian archduchess, was formerly one of the most beautiful princesses of Europe, but she has never regained either her health or her spirits since the death of her only son some years ago, and looks faded and careworn. On the king's death the crown will pass to his only brother, the Count de Flandres. This gentleman, whose wife, a beautiful and spirited lady, is a princess of the house of Hohenzollern, is as deaf as a post. He inhabits a very handsome palace in the heart of Brussels, and his own sleeping apartments are on the ground floor. One summer night the sentinel in charge was amazed to see a crowd gathered in front of the windows of the count's room, and evidently highly amused. On approaching it was discovered that the attendants had failed to close the outside shutters, and had drawn the lace curtains merely. The room was brilliantly lighted, and of course every part of it was distinctly visible from without. And there,
Dans le simple appareil
D'une beauté qu'on vient d'arracher au sommeil,