While I had been watching the Valenciennes and Cluny, the mother of the household, who had the mop of fuzzy dark red hair often seen in this region, had hurried her scrubbing to an end, and wiping her hands on her blue apron, was ready to uncover her own cushion. I looked at the chapped, rough skin and the hands used to pulling weeds and digging potatoes and scrubbing, and realized that they could not possibly hold a piece of fine sewing—the thread would catch with every stitch—and yet that she could turn from her scrubbing-brush to the little wooden bobbins (her fingers need not touch the thread) and proceed without difficulty on a snowy bit of Valenciennes—for happily she was following her mother in Valenciennes. There are three schools in Thielt, of which the convent schools de la Charité and de l’Espérance are the more important. I went first to the Convent de la Charité, with Mlle. van der Graeht, who has throughout the war been devoted to the workers and the lace. Tho Thielt lay in the danger zone, she refused to choose a safer city, remaining to share the work of her father, who added to his arduous duties as administrator of the _arrondisement_, those of the representative of the Brussels Lace Committee. Two weeks before the end, however, the Germans drove these patriots from their house (three bombs from Allied aeroplanes had already fallen on it) and they were denied the experience they had been waiting for throughout all the years, that of seeing the Allied soldiers march into Thielt. One of the Germans was frank enough to tell them that they were being forced away chiefly to prevent their “assisting” at that deliverance.