Te Rochefort gekomen, verzuimden wij niet, om de grotte de Han te bezoeken, welke, zoo zij een weinig racer bekend was, voorzeker de oplettendheid tot zich zoude trekken van alle Natuuronderzoekers, die ZuidNederland doorreizen. Rochefort ligt aan de oevers van dc rivier P/Iomme, die in een zeer eng en bogtig dal ftroomt. Zoodra men, van Dinant komende, de rivier is overgegaan, vertoont de kalkgrond zich overal en wordt alleen afgebroken door eene fchieferachtige
kalkkalklaag voor het dorp Han, hetwelk ongeveer een uur gaans van Rochefort verwijderd is.

Te St. Remi, bij Rochefort, was men bezig aan het uitgraven van fraai rood marmer met witte aderen en gezwaveld lood (Plomb fulfuré). Bij het dorp Hamer-enne, tusfchen Rochefort en Han zagen wij opgegraven polypenhuizen, (Polypiers), behoorende tot het gedacht der Tubiporae, (T. ftellata). Men vindt dezelve in ronde tepelvormige (lukken van ondcrfcheidene grootte, aan hoopen langs den weg liggen. Op de dwarfe breuk gelijken zij veel -naar de cellen van een wespennest.
De kalkgrond is met cene dunne laag leem bedekt op de plaatfen, die hier en daar bebouwd worden. Het land is in de omftreken van Rochefort, over het algemeen zeer naakt; de eenigfte bouwplantcn zijn haver, rogge, een weinig fpelt, welke onder de rogge gemengd flaat, en de aardappelen...

Verslag van een plant-landbouwkundig reisje...door Bronn en Courtois

Notwithstanding all which, however, our train reaches Jemelle (the nearest station to Rochefort) in safety, and in the midst of a wind sufficient, if not to take our heads, to take our hats off, we and our belongings come to the ground. It takes some minutes to get our nine packages together; and when we present ourselves at the door of the diligence, it is nearly full. I look despairingly at the nurse and all the children, and decide that the younger members of the family must go by diligence, and the elder shall walk with me to Rochefort. But the Rochefortians are too polite to permit such a thing. Two of them insist upon getting out and giving-up their places to the children. I protest against such a proceeding, of course, as in duty bound, but they will hear of no excuse, and start off walking at such a pace that they are out of sight before the diligence is set in motion. Ac last the luggage is all packed away on the top, and we are all packed away inside, in company with two gentlemen, who open the conversation pleasantly by asking us where we come from, and telling us that we must not expect to find Rochefort as large as Brussels, which, to say truth, we had scarcely anticipated. The talk becomes fragmentary, for the diligence rattles and jolts over the stony, hilly road, and the bells on the horses' collars jangle in unison; and the baby is so enchanted with the noise, that he shouts till no one 'can be heard but himself. But twenty minutes' purgatory brings us into a long steep narrow street, paved with stones and bordered with gray-and-white houses; and I have hardly time to ask, " Is this Rochefort?" when the diligence draws up before a whitewashed house with a sign swinging before the door, and I am asked if we are for the Hotel Biron. No, we are for the Hotel de la Cloche d'Or; and as no one seems to be for the Hotel Biron, the diligence continues to climb the stony street until it reaches the summit, and halts before the H6tel de la Cloche d'Or.

Here we all unpack ourselves; and a buxom German landlady, with a kind motherly face, comes down the steps to greet us. She-has received my letter; the beds are all ready for us; the dinner will be on the table in half an hour; we are to be pleased to enter, and make ourselves at home. We are very pleased; for we are dreadfully tired (not cold, for the weather is unnaturally mild), and have not had anything substantial to eat all the day. We climb up the steps of the hotel, which looks just like a farmhouse abutting on the main street, and find ourselves in a sanded room, containing a long wooden table, with benches either side of it, and bearing evident reminiscences of smoking and drinking—in fact, " not to put too fine a point on it," the public taproom—but where we are met by the landlady's two eldest daughters, Ther^se and Josephine, who are beaming in their welcome. They usher us into a second room, where the children scream at the sight of a table laid for dinner, and the four corners of which bear bowls of whipped cream and custard, and rosy Ardennes apples, and biscuits just out of the oven. The little people want to begin at once, and cannot be brought to see the necessity of washing their faces and hands first, or waiting till the meat and potatoes shall be placed upon the table. Would Madame like to see the chambres-a-coucher at once ? Madame saying yes, Therese catches up the youngest child but one, and, preceded by Josephine, we enter first a scullery, next a bricked passage, thence mount a most perilous set of dark narrow stairs, and stumble into a long whitewashed corridor, which terminates in a glass-door opening on to a garden. Here three doors successively thrown open introduce us to our bedrooms; and the trunks having been brought up the breakneck stairs, we take possession at once. The little whitecurtained beds are small, but beautifully clean, and each one is surmounted by its eider-down quilt in a coloured-cotton case. Two little islands of carpet in a sea of painted boards represent the coverings of the floors; and the washing-stands are only deal-tables, and there are no chests of drawers; but we inhale the fresh vigorous breeze which is pouring through the windows (open even at that season), and think of fever-infected Brussels, and are content. But though it is all very nice and clean, we cannot possibly wash without water, nor dry our hands without towels.

An imbecile shout from the door for anybody or anything brings a broad-featured, rosy, grinning German girl to our aid, who, when she is asked her name, says it is Katrine, but we can call her by any name we please. The pronunciation of " Katrine" not presenting those difficulties to our foreign tongues which the owner of it seems to anticipate, we prefer to adhere to her baptismal cognomen, instead of naming her afresh, and desire Katrine to bring us some hot water and towels; on which she disappears, still on the broad grin, and returns with a pail of warm water, which she sets down in the middle of the room. We manage well enough with that, however, but are at our wits' end when, on being asked for more of the same fluid with which to mix the baby's bottle, she presents it to ns in a washing-basin. But as, a few minutes after, I encounter her in the corridor carrying a coffee-pot full to E 'sroom, I conclude that in Rochefort it is the fashion to use vessels indiscriminately, and resolve thenceforth to take the goods the gods provide without questioning.

On descending to the dining-room, we find that the gods have been very munificent in their gifts. After the soup appears roast beef; and as we are very hungry, we cause it to look foolish, and are just congratulating each other on having made an excellent dinner, when in trots Therese, pops our dirty knives and forks upon the table-cloth, whips away our plates, with that which contains the remainder of the beef, and puts down a dish of mutton-chops in its stead. We look at one another in despair; we feel it to be perfectly impossible to begin again upon mutton-chops, and I am obliged to hint the same to Therese in the most delicate manner in the world. She expostulates; but to no purpose, and leaves the room, mutton-chops in hand. But only to give place to her mother, who enters with a countenance of dismay to inquire what is wrong with the cooking that we cannot eat.

Nothing is wrong ; we have eaten remarkably well. It is our capabilities of stowage which are at fault. Will we not have the hare, which is just ready to be served up ?

Sorry as we are to do it, we must decline the hare; and as we affirm that we are ready for the pudding and nothing else, we feel we have sunk in Madame's estimation.

The pudding, a compote of apples and preserves, with the whipped cream and custard, is delicious; and as soon as we have discussed it, we are very thankful to stretch ourselves under the eider-down quilts, and know the day to be over. We have done work enough that day to entitle us to twelve hours' repose; yet we are all wide-awake with the first beams of the morning sun.

We dress ourselves with the pleasurable anticipation of seeing new things, however simple, and come down-stairs to a breakfast-table in its way as plentifully spread as the dinner-table of the night before. We have an abundance of milk,—so fresh from the cow that it is covered with froth, and the jug which contains it is quite warm,—eggs, cold meat, home-made bread in huge round loaves, good butter, and strong clear coffee. In fact, we come to the conclusion that our landlady knows how to live, and we no longer marvel at the rosy cheeks and full forms of Therese and Josephine, nor that Madame herself fills out her dresses in such a magnificent manner.

E has been for a stroll before breakfast, and brings back a report of ruins on the high ground; he has already unpacked his sketchbooks and sharpened his pencils. We, not being walking encyclopaedias, Beize our Continental Bradsliaw, and find that the ruins are those of a castle in which Lafayette was made prisoner by the Austrians in 1792.

As soon as breakfast is concluded, we rush off to see the mined castle, which stands on an eminence just above the hotel, and which our landlady (who walks into our sitting-room and takes a chair in the most confiding manner possible whenever she feels so inclined) informs us, although not open to the public, belongs to a lady whose house is built on the same ground, and who will doubtless allow ns to look over it. We can see the remains of the castle before we reach them, and decide that it must]] have been uglier and less interesting when whole than now, having been evidently designed with a view to strength rather than beauty. The little winding acclivitous path which leads to it, bounded by a low wall fringed with ferns and mosses, is perhaps the prettiest part of the whole concern; but just as we have scaled it, and come upon the private [dwelling-house, our poetic meditations are interrupted by the onslaught of half-a-dozen dogs (one of which is loose, and makes fierce snaps at our unprotected legs), which rush out of their kennels at chains' length, and bark so vociferously, that we feel we have no need to make our presence known by knocking at the door. A child appears at it; and we inquire politely if we may see the ruins, at which she shakes her head, and we imagine she doesn't understand our Parisian French.

But in another moment we are undeceived, for the shrill, vixenish voice of a woman (may dogs dance upon her grave!) exclaims sharply from the open door, " Fermez, fermez; on ne pent pas entrer." The child obediently claps it to in our faces, and we retrace our steps, with a conviction that the lady is like her castle—more strong than beautiful.

E is so disgusted that he will not even sketch the ruins from the opposite side of the road, up which another precipitous path leads ns to a long walk, which in summer] must be a perfect bower, from the interlacing of the branches of the trees with which it is bordered; and from which we have a far better view of the ruins than the utmost politeness of their owner could have afforded us. But no; judgment has gone out against them; we decide they are heavy and unpicturesqne, and not worth the trouble; and we walk on in hopes of finding something better : and are rewarded. At the close of the long overshadowed walk, a quaint little chapel, beside which stands a painted wooden crucifix nearly the size of life, excites our curiosity, and, walking round it, we come upon one of the loveliest scenes, even in the month of February, that Nature ever produced.

A green valley, creeping^in sinuous folds between two ranges of high hills; one rocky and coated with heather, the other clothed with wood. Beneath the rocky range there winds a road bordered by trees> —along which we can see the red diligence which brought us from the ... taking its jangling way,—and beside it runs a stream, terminaling in a cascade and a bridge, and the commencement of the lower part of Rochefort. All the fields are cut upon the sides of hills, and are diversified by clumps of rock covered with ferns, and usually the groundwork of a well, protected by a few rough planks, or the fountainhead of a mountain-stream which trickles down until it joins the river. This is the valley of Jemelle, to see which in the proper season would alone be worth a journey to Rochefort. We look and admire, and lament the impossibility of ever transferring such a scene to canvas as it should be done; and then we turn back whence we came, and find we are standing at the entrance of an artificial cave, situated at the back of the crucifix before alluded to, and which forms perhaps as great a contrast to the natural loveliness we have just looked upon, as could well be. Apparently it is the tomb of some woman, by the framed requests which hang on either side that prayers may be offered for the repose of her soul; but had her friends turned out upon her grave all the maimed and motley rubbish to be found in a nursery playbox of some years' standing, they could scarcely have decorated it in, a less seemly manner. At the end of the cave is a wooden grating, behind which is exhibited one of those tawdry assemblages of horrors which tend more perhaps than all else to bring dishonour on the Roman-Catholic religion, so utterly opposed are they to our conceived ideas of what is sacred. Two or three rudely-carved and coarselypainted, almost grotesque, wooden groups of the dead Christ, the Holy Family, and the Crucifixion, form the groundwork of this exhibition ; the interstices being filled up with gold-and-white jars of dirty artificial flowers; framed prints of saints with lace borders, reminding one of the worst description of valentines ; and composite figures, supposed to represent the same individuals, and which may have cost fifty centimes apiece. The collection is such as to make the spectator shudder to see holy things so unholily treated; and it is difficult to conceive how, in this century, when art has been carried to such a pitch that even our commonest jugs and basins have assumed forms consistent with it, anyone, even the lowest, can be satisfied with such designs and colouring as these things display.

Returning homeward by the lower part of the town, we pass a maiton retigieuse dedicated to St. Joseph, and in the garden see the good little sisters joining their pupils, to the number of forty or fifty, in a merry game of " Here we go round the mulberry-bush," and apparently taking as much pleasure in the exercise as the youngest there. The church and churchyard stand at this end of Rochefort. There is nothing in the building to attract one's notice, except that we agree that it is the ugliest we have ever seen; but we walk round the little churchyard, the paucity of graves in which speaks well for the climate of the place. The crosses and railings, made of the commonest wood and in the most fragile manner, are all rotting as they stand or lie (several having assumed the recumbent position); and we are leaving