I began my visit in a little room at the right of the entrance hall, where six older girls were still at work, tho the 500 other pupils had gone for their lunch. Dozens of rubbed carbon copies of lace patterns were pinned to the walls along with executed samples of the lace they represented. This was a _piqué_ class-room; the young women seated at high, narrow tables, were carefully at work on pieces of glossy green cardboard on which the lace design had been drawn and which they were pricking with pins, or covering with tiny holes, that indicate the position of the pins that must hold the thread as it is twisted or looped or braided, by the worker. The cardboard piqué is in a sense both the beginning and the end of the lace course; the beginning, since no pupil can start his lace without the piqué, or interpreted pattern, and the end, since it is the most difficult of all the processes in the technique of the lace. The _piqueuse_ must understand the design and its practical execution, must interpret the picture to the worker in terms of pin-pricks marking the progress of her thread. A good piqueuse knows immediately, on looking at a drawing, whether it is a true lace design, or must be adapted, and also in which kind of lace it can be best exprest. As she shifts a pin-prick less than a hair’s width to the left or to the right she varies appreciably the resulting mesh or flower. She has considerable liberty in deciding which particular stitches will be most effective to fill in the jours, or open-work spaces indicated in the pattern. One of the great evils of the past has been the absence of training-schools, and the consequent lack of piqueuses; in each generation there have been but a few good ones, who have, in a sense, held the lace industry in their hands. Before the war, Ypres had two famous piqueuses, to whom patterns were sent from an entire region; and in the town of Turnhout to-day, with its thousands of workers, tho there are several less experienced piqueuses, there is but one woman to whom the finest and most complicated drawings can be entrusted for interpretation. She is the only person, for example, who could make the piqué for the beautiful scarf, which I saw later being executed in the Point de Paris room—for that she received 90 francs. It is a common saying that one must be born a piqueuse to succeed; at least it remains true that in addition to her capacity for an intricate and most meticulous labor, the piqueuse should possess a high sensitiveness to art values. The little room in the Abbé Berraly’s school is one expression of the Lace Committee’s conviction that the emancipation of the industry and of the lace-maker will come only through education. [Illustration: ABBÉ BERRALY SCHOOL, TURNHOUT General view] [Illustration: NINE-YEAR-OLD CHILDREN MAKING POINT DE PARIS]