Europe and elsewhere, by Mark Twain [pseud.] [with an appreciation by Brander Matthews and an introduction by Albert Bigelow Paine]

EUROPE AND ELSEWHERE

his shoulders and have marvels left that not even
the trunk could be indifferent to.
These citizens of Flanders-Flounders, I think they
call them, though I feel sure I have eaten a creature
of that name or seen it in an aquarium or a menagerie,
or in a picture or somewhere-are a thrifty, industrious race, and are as commercially wise and farsighted as they were in Edward the Third's time,
and as enduring and patient under adversity as they
were in Charles the Bold's. They are prolific in the
matter of children; in some of the narrow streets
every house seemed to have had a freshet of children,
which had burst through and overflowed into the
roadway. One could hardly get along for the pack
of juveniles, and they were all soiled and all healthy.
They all wore wooden shoes, which clattered noisily
on the stone pavements. All the women were hard
at work; there were no idlers about the houses.
The men were away at labor, no doubt. In nearly
every door women sat at needlework or something
of that marketable nature-they were knitting principally. Many groups of women sat in the street,
in the shade of walls, making point lace. The lace
maker holds a sort of pillow on her knees with a strip
of cardboard fastened on it, on which the lace pattern
has been punctured. She sticks bunches of pins in
the punctures and about them weaves her web of
threads. The numberless threads diverge from the
bunch of pins like the spokes of a wheel, and the
spools from which the threads are being unwound
form the outer circle of the wheel. The woman
throws these spools about her with flying fingers, in
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