able history, a task in which he was
successful in spite of the carping of envious contemporaries.

A committee of artists was appointed to examine his work, and although
this body decided in his favor, it may be that the criticism to which
he was subjected hastened his death. At any rate the panels remained
unfinished, no other painter having the courage to carry out the
projected work.

[Illustration: Arcade of the Cloth Hall: Ypres]

The original sketches for these great compositions were preserved in the
museum of the town, but the detailed drawings, some in color, were, up
to the outbreak of the war in 1914, in the Museum of Decorative Arts in
Brussels, together with the cartoons of another artist, Charles de Groux
(1870), to whom the decoration of the Halles had been awarded by the
State in competition. A most sumptuous Gothic apartment was that styled
the "Salle Echevinale," restored with great skill in recent years by a
concurrence of Flemish artists, members of the Academy. Upon either side
of a magnificent stone mantel, bearing statues in niches of kings,
counts and countesses, bishops and high dignitaries, were large well
executed frescoes by MM. Swerts and Guffens, showing figures of the
evangelists St. Mark and St. John, surrounded by myriads of counts and
countesses of Flanders, from the time of Louis de Nevers and Margaret of
Artois to Charles the Bold, and Margaret of York, whose tombs are in the
Cathedral at Bruges. The attribution of these frescoes to Melchior
Broederlam does not, it would seem, accord with the style or the date of
their production, M. Alph. van den Peereboom thinks, and he gives
credit for the work to two painters who worked in Ypres in 1468--MM.
Pennant and Floris Untenhoven.

In my search for the curious and picturesque, I came, one showery day,
upon a passageway beneath the old belfry which led to the tower of St.
Martin's. Here one might believe himself back in the Middle Ages. On
both sides of the narrow street were ancient wooden-fronted houses not a
whit less interesting or well preserved than that front erected in the
chamber of the "Halles." This small dark street led to a vast and
solitary square. On one side were lofty edifices called the Colonnade of
the "Nieuwerck," at the end of which was a quaint vista of the Grand'
Place. On the other side was a range of most wondrous ancient
constructions; the _conciergerie_ and its attendant offices, bearing
finials and gables of