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Here the Sambre, a
small, orderly stream, no larger or broader or wider than a good-sized
creek would be in America, flows for a mile or two almost due east and
weSt. The northern bank is almost flat, with low hills rising on beyond
like the rim of a saucer. The town--most of it--is on this side. On
the south the land lifts in a moderately stiff bluff, perhaps seventy
feet high, with wooded edges, and extending off and away in a plateau,
where trees stand in well-thinned groves, and sunken roads meander
between fields of hops and grain and patches of cabbages and sugar
beets. As for the town, it has perhaps twenty-five hundred people--
Walloons and Flemish folk--living in tall, bleak, stone houses built
flush with the little crooked streets. Invariably these houses are of a
whitish gray color; almost invariably they are narrow and cramped-
looking, with very peaky gables, somehow suggesting flat-chested old men
standing in close rows, with their hands in their pockets and their
shoulders shrugged up.


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