After lunch I started with Madame Cuseners to the little lace school whose director has courageously carried on during the four years. We walked through a narrow arched passageway beside a brick building and into a large hall at the rear which was at one time the lace class-room. Instead of lace-workers, however, we found Scotch and Canadian soldiers busy tacking the Union Jack and Belgian flags on the wall, and hanging boughs and festoons of colored paper rings—they were making ready for a “grand” New Year’s Eve dancing party. In the courtyard still farther back a half-dozen Scotchmen had built a campfire, protecting it with a low canvas roof, and it was burning brightly despite the dismal rain. It shone on the windows of the long, narrow room at the side of the court, which looked like a conservatory, but which had become the refuge of the lace-workers, when because of lack of thread and fuel, they could no longer occupy their hall. I found fifty sweet-faced girls between thirteen and fifteen busy over their cushions, a faithful, tired-looking old Abbé and an enthusiastic young woman teacher. They were not making black nor the less important white silk Chantilly, for they had long been entirely without silk thread. Nevertheless, they were preserving the art of making it, since they had been kept at work on Chantilly designs executed with bobbins and the white cotton thread furnished by the Committee. They had some fine flounces, which were not, however, to be compared with the traditional black silk ones of the great Chantilly days. For Chantilly has seen great days. It appeared first in France about 1740, where it achieved a phenomenal popularity, which was unfortunately rudely ended by the Revolution, for since it was a favorite lace at court, the Revolutionists made it a crime to appear in Chantilly. Later, under the Empire, it enjoyed a revival, the fabrication of the silk laces spread in France; Bayeux became a celebrated center; and, finally, toward 1835, it crossed to Belgium, where Grammont was early recognized as its home. In 1851 all of the forty-nine schools of that province taught the technique of this lace. Then toward 1870 true Chantilly seemed doomed a second time to extinction by the success of the machine imitations of St. Pierre des Calais, and also because the vogue for black lace had passed. But again the pendulum has swung back; the imitations are now greatly in favor and there is a cheering increase in the demand for the true lace flounces.