Little Travels and Roadside Sketches by William Makepeace Thackeray

1. GHENT. (1840.)

The Beguine College or Village is one of the most extraordinary sights / that all Europe can show. On the confines of the town of Ghent you come / upon an old-fashioned brick gate, that seems as if it were one of the / city barriers; but, on passing it, one of the prettiest sights possible / meets the eye: At the porter's lodge you see an old lady, in black and / a white hood, occupied over her book; before you is a red church with a / tall roof and fantastical Dutch pinnacles, and all around it rows upon / rows of small houses, the queerest, neatest, nicest that ever were seen / (a doll's house is hardly smaller or prettier). Right and left, on each / side of little alleys, these little mansions rise; they have a courtlet / before them, in which some green plants or hollyhocks are growing; / and to each house is a gate, that has mostly a picture or queer-carved / ornament upon or about it, and bears the name, not of the Beguine who / inhabits it, but of the saint to whom she may have devoted it -- the house / of St. Stephen, the house of St. Donatus, the English or Angel Convent, / and so on. Old ladies in black are pacing in the quiet alleys here and / there, and drop the stranger a curtsy as he passes them and takes off / his hat. Never were such patterns of neatness seen as these old ladies / and their houses. I peeped into one or two of the chambers, of which the / windows were open to the pleasant evening sun, and saw beds scrupulously / plain, a quaint old chair or two, and little pictures of favorite saints / decorating the spotless white walls. The old ladies kept up a quick, / cheerful clatter, as they paused to gossip at the gates of their little / domiciles; and with a great deal of artifice, and lurking behind walls, / and looking at the church as if I intended to design that, I managed to / get a sketch of a couple of them.