When I arrived at Courtrai, Monsieur and his family were just moving back into the house from which they had been ejected. They apologized for the room they so hospitably offered me, in which the original bed had been replaced by an iron one they recognized as having belonged to an English family of Courtrai. The brass trimmings were gone, and the mattress had of course been removed, but Madame had been able to find one stuffed with sea-moss for me. The curtains were slashed, blocks of wood nailed to the once handsome walls, there were no lights, no metal knobs or fixtures of any kind, no service wires left. Below, the cellar had been almost filled with concrete to provide the conqueror a safe refuge during danger periods. It requires a special kind of courage to take up life again in a place like this, but these good people said: “We can not complain, we are so much better off than others, and at least we have saved our health; with that we can be sure of being able to build again what they have destroyed.” From there I went to Baron de Bethune, a connoisseur of laces, who had before the war opened a lace museum in Courtrai, chiefly for Valenciennes. I found him ill in a little house in the town; he had long before been driven from his château in the suburbs. His sister, who had with great difficulty made her way from Louvain, received me with apologies in the midst of a heterogeny of boxes and packages, the few personal possessions they had gathered together in the hope of some day having a home again. I was not to see the old Valenciennes and other specimens of the famous lace days of Courtrai; fortunately for his museum, Monsieur had succeeded in getting them to Brussels where they were still, to my personal regret, hidden away. However, I was not surprized, for I had been unable before starting for Flanders to see the celebrated collection of the Cinquantenaire Museum at Brussels, for that, too, had been successfully secreted. Museums are slow in rehanging their treasures. Even tho the presence of the three neutral Ministers, the Spanish, American and Dutch, in the capital, was supposed to be a guaranty of protection to the national collections, and undoubtedly it was only their presence that prevented in Belgium what happened to the Museums of Northern France, the Belgians with unwearying ingenuity concealed what they could. Whenever I hear of hidden laces, I am reminded of a morning at Malines and a sad little basket containing a fine collection of old Malines lace, I saw exhumed. It had been buried deep in a box, along with the family silver, and as the daughter of the mother who had worn it took its once lovely flowers and webs, now gray and earth-stained, between her fingers, they powdered to dust.