However, we set out upon a voyage of discovery, accompanied by a little army of baggage porters and lackeys, one word of whose language we did not understand, but who did not on that account cease to hurl at our devoted heads every barbarous guttural of their macadamising tongue.
In this manner we made the tour of the entire town, and I was concluding a most affecting appeal to the sympathies of the vinegar-faced landlady of the Hôtel d’Hollande, which I already perceived would prove unsuccessful, when a German merchant with whom we had travelled from Rotterdam made his appearance, and by his kind interference we were admitted. Having realised our intentions with respect to supper, fatigued and worn out by our indefatigable exertions, we wrapped our travelling cloaks around us and slept soundly till morning.
As we had arrived one day before the Festival, we had full time to see the town. It was a mass of dark, narrow, ill-paved streets, with high gloomy-looking houses, each story projecting beyond the one beneath, and thus scarcely admitting the light of the blue heavens.
The Cathedral, however, is one of the most beautiful specimens of the florid Gothic remaining in Europe, and would, had it been completed, have eclipsed the more celebrated Cathedral of Strasbourg: the great entrance presents the richest instance of the laboured tracery of this school of architecture I have ever witnessed. The structure was originally designed to be built in the shape of a cross, but two limbs were all that were finished. The exterior is divided into a number of small chapelries, each of which boasts its patron saint, whose bones are exhibited in a glass-case to the admiration of the devotee.
Amongst the many relics preserved here, I well recollect with what pride the venerable sexton pointed out to me the skulls of Die Heilige drei Könige--by this meant the Magi, whom they call the Three Holy Kings, one of whom being an African, his skull had been most appropriately painted black.
In the middle of the great aisle stands a large misshapen block of marble, about two feet in height, and from three to four feet in length: this could never have formed any portion of the building, and stands, like our Irish Round Towers, a stumbling-block to the antiquarian.