The Heiress of Bruges - 1844 Author:Thomas Colley Grattan Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: progress in manners and knowledge, under the influence of a highly bred wife, and his own instinctive aptness to improve advantages. Secured in his possessions, ... more »and every day extending his influence in the city, it was evident that if ever the country succeeded in establishing its independence, he would be one of the first men (if not the very first man) of Bruges. And leaving our old acquaintance in this prosperous state, we now take a lonr leave of him, and his faithful ally, the Dominican. CHAPTER III. Although fifteen years form a long period in reality, they seem to present in retrospect a space but little wider than that which divides the close of our last chapter from the opening of this. The concluding event there particularly specified was the baptismal ceremony of our heroine that is to be, Theresa Van Rozenhoed ; but the progress of two or three years after that circumstance must be taken into account, to allow for her father's and his confessor's advances in the world, alluded to in the final paragraph; so that, by the strict rules of calculation, we find our aforesaid heroine to be now eighteen years of age, and we resume our history in the spring of the year of grace 1600. It was on a beautiful evening in the latter end of April in that year, that the newly elected chief burgomaster of the city of Bruges was sitting in a rustic arm-chair, on the terrace of his garden, which looked upon the large square basin forming part of the canal, that extends from the cathedral of Notre Dame, in front of the Dyver and of Steen-Houwer's Dyk. In the unenclosed space which had formerly separated these two handsome quays, and directly opposite the basin on its southern side, another had of late years been built, and now joined them together. The houses of this new quay, ...« less