It is a grim, forbidding place, now known as the Château des Comtes. On three sides high black walls rise straight out of the water, and on the fourth side a deep archway leads into a large courtyard, in the middle of which is the donjon, said to date from the ninth century. There is a vast, dim banquet-hall, with an immense chimney-piece, and small windows with stone seats sunk deep in the walls, where King Edward III. of England and Queen Philippa feasted with Jacques van Artevelde in the year 1339, during the war with France. Dark, narrow staircases lead from story to story within the thickness of the walls, or wind up through turrets pierced with small windows a few inches square. Far down in the foundations are dismal oubliettes and torture-chambers; and in one corner of what is supposed to have been a prison is an iron-bound chest full of the skeletons of persons who suffered in the religious troubles of the sixteenth century. This gloomy place, once the abode of so much cruelty, is one of the most interesting sights in Ghent. [Illustration: GHENT THE Banquet Hall, Château des Comtes.] Charles V. was born at Ghent in the Cour des Princes, a magnificent palace, of which nothing but a single gateway now remains. John of Gaunt (or Ghent) was born here, too. Here took place the marriage of the Archduke Maximilian to Mary of Burgundy, which gave the Netherlands to the House of Austria. And here, in the Carthusian monastery in the Rue des Chartreux, in a room which is now one of the refectories, Lord Gambier, as Ambassador for George III., signed, on Christmas Eve, 1814, the articles of peace which put an end to the war between Great Britain and the United States of America. Everywhere, however, in Flanders the chief connecting-link between the past and the present is to be found at the Hôtel de Ville, the centre of the civic life; and it would be hard to find in all the Netherlands, except at Brussels, a more splendid example of Gothic architecture than the north side of the Hôtel de Ville at Ghent.