In the advanced lace class-room, thirty girls, between thirteen and sixteen, were working with cotton thread on Venise insertions and on details for larger pieces. They had come at 8 o’clock that morning, a more humane beginning hour than most schools allow, and would remain as long as there was daylight—looping and weaving with a needle and single thread. I stopt beside Rosalie, who was making a pretty flower detail for a cushion cover. She had begun it five days before and hoped to finish, and receive the seven francs she was allowed for it, that night. On the table was a pile of chairbacks in Venise, with figure centers and surrounding garlands of flowers all connected by the bars characterizing this lace—an order for a Brussels dealer, who had recently offered fifty-two francs each for them. The sisters were excited and happy over this new price, which was considerably more than anything Heckelgem has hitherto been able to command, one and a half francs a day having been the average wage of the best workers. A little farther to the south and still in Brabant, tho it lies near the Flanders border, is the much better known convent of Liedekerke, which boasts an unbroken record of sixty years of lace-making, and which before the war received a yearly subsidy of 800 francs from the “Amies de la Dentelle.” As we walked beside the pretty orchard and vegetable garden, bright with purple cabbages, that form the entrance court, toward the rather impressive red-brick buildings, again with their odd miniature steeple, I saw the great arms of a Dutch windmill turning lazily somewhere in the rear. And nearer the door, off at the left in a side court, a war-kitchen with tiled floor and uncertain roof, where hundreds of the village poor still were coming for their daily pint of soup. Of the 4,000 inhabitants as many as 2,900 were forced on to the soup-line during the occupation. This, then, was one of the important and successful convent schools of Belgium; but in January, 1919, it was in a much sadder plight than the little neighboring school at Heckelgem. There was no coal, not a class was in session, not a child at work with her bobbins. At 4 o’clock in the afternoon, on Monday, October 28, when there were between 800 and 900 children, among them 100 lace-workers, gathered in the various class-rooms, German officers had appeared to announce that by 7 o’clock the rooms must be cleared of both teachers and children. I had already had many demonstrations of what taking possession of school-rooms meant. It was not necessary that the sisters should lead me from room to room, pointing out this or that ruined wall, or casement torn away, or vacant space where the benches or chairs burned as firewood, once stood; but I followed them about for their own sakes. There was at least a kind of comfort in being able to furnish proof of these outrages to somebody.