Excerpt from A Journey Due North: Being Notes of a Residence in Russia I am bound on a stern, long, cruel, rigid journey, far, far away, to the extreme right-hand top corner of the map of Europe - but first Due North. And here I am at Erquellines on the frontier of the king dom of Belgium and this is why I thanked Heaven I was here. Not very far northward is Erquellines; and yet I felt as if I had passed the Rubicon, when a parti-coloured sentry-box, the counterfeit present ment of the peculiarly sheepish-looking Belgian lion sitting on his hind-legs, with the legend Union is strength, (and, indeed, I think it would take a good many of these lions to make a strong one, ) and a posse of custom-house officers - kindly, but pud ding headed in appearance - told me that I was in the Royaume de Belgique. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.