the extreme west point of Belgian Flanders, which is also the extreme
west point of Belgium as a whole. Flanders, be it always remembered,
does not terminate with mere, present-day, political divisions, but
spreads with unbroken character to the very gateways of Calais and
Lille. Hazebrouck, for example, is a thoroughly Flemish town, though
nearly ten miles, in a beeline, inside the French border--Flemish not
merely, like Dunkirk, in the architecture of its great brick church,
but also actually Flemish in language, and in the names that one reads
above its shop doors. In particular, excursions may be pleasantly made
from Furnes--whose principal inn, the Noble Rose, is again a quaint
relic of the sixteenth century--to the two delightful little
market-towns of Dixmude and Nieuport-Ville: I write, as always, of what
was recently, and of what I have seen myself; to-day they are probably
heaps of smoking ruin, and sanguinary altars to German "kultur."
Nieuport-Ville, so called in distinction from its dull little
watering-place understudy, Nieuport-les-Bains, which lies a couple of
miles to the west of it, among the sand-dunes by the mouth of the Yser,
and is hardly worth a visit unless you want to bathe--Nieuport-Ville,
in addition to its old yellow-brick Halles, or Cloth Hall, and its
early Tour des Templiers, is remarkable for its possession of a
fascinating church, the recent restoration of which has been altogether
conservative and admirable. Standing here, in this rich and picturesque
interior, you realize strongly the gulf in this direction between
Belgium and France, in which latter country, in these days of
ecclesiastical poverty, loving restoration of the kind here seen is
rare, and whose often neglected village churches seldom, or never,
exhibit that wealth of marble rood-screen and sculptured woodwork--of
beaten brass and hammered iron--that distinguishes Belgian church
interiors from perhaps all others on earth. The church has also some
highly important brasses, another detail, common of course in most
counties of England, that is now never, or hardly ever, found in
France. Chief, perhaps, among these is the curious, circular brass--I
hope it has escaped--with figures of husband, wife, and children, on a
magnificently worked background, that is now suspended on the northwest
pier of the central crossing. Very Belgian, too, in character is the
rood-beam, with its three figures of Our Lord in Crucifixion, of the
Vir