ing odor of broiled bacon. Our whistle brought out the whole
family, and likewise a little nervous black and white dog who went
nearly mad with the excitement attendant upon driving us away from the
property he had to protect.

Night was falling when we reached the quay side in Antwerp, and we
disembarked to the tinkling melody of the wondrous chimes from the tower
of the great Cathedral.

Louvain

Louvain

It was in the great Gothic Church of St. Peter that Mathias Van den
Gheyn delighted to execute those wonderful "_morceaux fugues_" now at
once the delight and the despair of the musical world, upon the fine
chime of bells in the tower. This venerable tower was entirely destroyed
in the terrible bombardment of the town in 1914. It is probable that no
town in Belgium was more frequented by learned men of all professions,
since its university enjoyed such a high reputation the world over, and
certainly its library, likewise entirely destroyed, with its precious
tomes and manuscripts, was considered second to none.

The old Church of St. Peter, opposite the matchless Hotel de Ville, was
a cruciform structure of noble proportions and flanked with remarkable
chapels; it was begun, according to the archives in Brussels, in 1423,
to replace an earlier building of the tenth century, and was "finished"
in the sixteenth century. There was, it seems, originally a wooden spire
on the west side of the structure but "it was blown down in a storm in
1606."

When I saw it in 1910, the church was in process of restoration, and
the work was being very intelligently done by competent men. Before the
facade was a most curious row of bizarre small houses of stucco, nearly
every one of which was a sort of saloon or cafe, and the street before
them was quite obstructed by small round tables and chairs at which, in
the afternoon from four to five, the shopkeepers and bourgeois of the
town gathered for the afternoon "_aperitif_," whatever it might be, and
to discuss politics. For be it known that this period before the
outbreak of the war, was in Belgium a troublous one for the Flemings,
because of the continued friction between the clerical and the
anti-clerical parties. These bizarre houses, I was told by one of the
priests with whom I talked, were owned by the church, and were very
profitable holdings, but tourists and others had made such sport of
them, and even entered such grave protests to the Bishop, that the
aut