. Of the town, the great
squat church of St. Martin, and the quaint town hall adjoining it, now
not one stone remains upon another. The old mossy walls and bastion are
level with the soil, and even the course of the small sluggishly flowing
river Yser is changed by the ruin that chokes it.

I found it to be a melancholy, faded-out kind of place in 1910, when I
last saw it. I came down from Antwerp especially to see old St.
Martin's, which enshrined a most wondrous _Jube_, or altar screen, and a
chime of bells from the workshop of the Van den Gheyns. There was
likewise on the Grand' Place, a fine old prison of the fourteenth
century, its windows all closed with rusty iron bars, most of which were
loose in the stones. I tried them, to the manifest indignation of the
solitary gendarme, who saw me from a distance across the Grand' Place
and hurried over to place me under arrest. I had to show him not only my
passport but my letter of credit and my sketch book before he would
believe that I was what I claimed to be, a curious American, and
something of an antiquary. But it was the sketch book that won him, for
he told me that he had a son studying painting in Antwerp at the
academy. So we smoked together on a bench over the bridge of the "Pape
Gaei" and he related the story of his life, while I made a sketch of the
silent, grass-grown Grand' Place and the squat tower of old St.
Martin's, and the Town Hall beside it.

While we sat there on the bench only two people crossed the square, that
same square that witnessed the entry of Charles the Fifth amid the
silk-and velvet-clad nobles and burghers, and the members of the great
and powerful guilds, which he regarded and treated with such respect. In
those days the town had a population of thirty thousand or more. On this
day my friend the gendarme told me that there were about eleven hundred
in the town. Of this eleven hundred I saw twelve market people, the
_custode_ of the church of St. Martin; ditto that of the Town Hall; the
gendarme; one baby in the arms of a crippled girl, and two gaunt cats.

The great docks to which merchantmen from all parts of the earth came in
ships in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had now vanished, and
long green grass waved in the meadows where the channel had been.

[Illustration: The Ancient Place: Dixmude]

The ancient corporations and brotherhood, formerly of such power and
renown, had likewise long since vanished, and nought remai