The gentleman on the cover of this book, holding his hat, is Mr. Horatio Coggeshall, manufacturer of pianos, from London, England. The two little girls are his daughters, Celeste and Melisande.

The wind that blows through the open stonework on the top floor of the belfry, where they stand, comes from the North Sea and sweeps across Belgium.

The boy is Jan, son of the proprietor of The Golden Basket, a good hotel of twenty rooms, which stands below on the great square of the city of Bruges.

Above the little group can be seen some of the bells, part of the famous carillon, that send their iron music "clink, clank, clunk" every fifteen minutes over the roofs of the old town below.

Ludwig Bemelmans went to Europe and painted the earnest houses, the silent winding canals, their artful bridges, the tall chestnut trees that lean over them, and the many swans on the green waters.

The wind that comes from the sea pushed in a herd of clouds, which stayed, and while it rained for three weeks, Mr. Bemelmans wrote a story to go with the pictures, about the children and Mr. Goggeshall, a lemon soufflé, and a French general who eats cucumber salad in bed in the middle of the night, about a submarine, the Mayor of Bruges, swans, and a frog that lives in a bottle, about the carillon, and about how to come home after falling into the Canal.

From the dust jacket