This building was once the Customs House of Bruges,
conveniently situated in the neighbourhood of the Market-Place, and
on the side of the Roya, which thence stretches eastwards between
the Quai du Miroir and the Quai Spinola for a few hundred yards,
and then turns sharply to the north, and continues between the
Quai Long and the Quai de la Potterie, which are built in rambling
fashion on either side of the water. Some of the houses are old,
others of no earlier date, apparently, than the seventeenth or
eighteenth centuries; some large and well preserved, and some mere
cottages, half ruinous, with low gables and faded yellow fronts,
huddled together on the rough causeway, alongside of which are
moored canal-boats with brown hulls and deck-houses gay with white
and green paint. At the end of the Quai de la Potterie is the modern
Bassin de Commerce, in which the Roya loses itself, the harbour for
the barges and small steamers which come by the canal connecting
Ostend with Bruges and Ghent; and near this was, in ancient days,
the Porte de Damme, through which Breidel and his followers burst
on that fateful morning in May 600 years ago.
To the right of the Bassin a broad canal, constructed by Napoleon
in 1810, extends in a straight line eastwards, contained within
dykes which raise it above a wide expanse of level meadow-lands
intersected by ditches, and dotted here and there by the white-walled
cottages with red roofs and green outside shutters which are so
typical of Flemish scenery.
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