It would have been pleasant to talk of other master-works, but we had already sat too long before the fire and we hurried now to reach the large, airy class-room across the court before dark. When starting on my lace journey, I had been warned that, once I had visited the bobbin-lace work-room with all the picturesqueness of the cushion with its mounds of bobbins and clustered pins, and of the flying fingers and the continuous cadences of the clinking wood, I would find needle-lace classes uninteresting. In the beginning this was true; there was nothing particularly dramatic or stirring in a great room filled with girls and young women holding little black paper patterns in their hands and plying a needle above them. But the more I watched these little patterns and the fingers directing the needle and thread, the more marvelous the accomplishment appeared—cotton and linen so fine that it seemed impossible that any finger should control them—cobwebby, diaphanous meshes, richly petalled tiny flowers, and delicately veined leaves growing beneath just a common needle and a single thread. In the end I looked eagerly for the needle rooms. [Illustration: “THE TOURNEY” BANQUET CLOTH Design reproducing a mediæval painting in Tournai, executed in Venise lace by 10 workers in one month, mounting and embroidery by five workers in one month. Price in Brussels, 1,000 francs] [Illustration: “ARMS OF YPRES” CUSHION COVER IN VENISE, WITH DETAILS IN FLANDERS] And this was the most rewarding one I had yet visited. It happened that the majority of the pupils were busy on the details of a tablecloth recently designed by Madame Allard, in which the linen center is encircled by a family of little beasts as gay as any ever gathered together to cheer a dinner company. I laughed outright, as a little girl, herself laughing, held up an exquisitely worked and most vividly real group of happy ducks floating on a pond. The next showed her enchanting rabbits, another her deer—all along the line they were chuckling over the success of their particular pets. They had captured the sunshine and happy motion of a farm-yard world with just a needle and a single linen thread! Here, as at Erembodeghem, only linen thread is used, because tho it is more difficult to handle, it produces a finer and stronger lace than cotton. After several months (it took six months to execute the first cloth of this design) the details would be assembled and joined by special workers, following the large paper pattern the sisters were now spreading across a table, which had been sent down to Opbrakel from the room of design at Brussels. And the finished cloth, as delightful as an early naive tapestry with its smiling animals, would be sent to the Committee for sale.