And her great parks, her lakes gay with pleasure-boats or choked with lily- pads, her haunted forests, where your taxicab would startle the wild deer, are the most beautiful I have ever seen in any city in the world.
As, in the days of the Second Empire, Louis Napoleon bedecked Paris, so Leopold decorated Brussels.

In her honor and to his own glory he gave her new parks, filled in her moats along her ancient fortifications, laid out boulevards shaded with trees, erected arches, monuments, museums.

That these jewels he hung upon her neck were wrung from the slaves of the Congo does not make them the less beautiful.

And before the Germans came the life of the people of Brussels was in keeping with the elegance, beauty, and joyousness of their surroundings.
At the Palace Hotel, which is the clearing-house for the social life of Brussels, we found everybody taking his ease at a little iron table on the sidewalk.

It was night, but the city was as light as noonday-- brilliant, elated, full of movement and color.