stitches.” Since the snow-covered roads made traveling extremely hazardous, I decided that I could not stop longer, no matter how absorbing the Applications and Points d’Angleterre, or how endearing the personality and contagious the enthusiasm of Stéphanie. I said “Good-by,” explaining that I had yet that day to visit the needle-lace school at Zele, twenty kilometers away. XII ZELE _Stéphanie Visits the Trade Union Lace School_ But I was not to have to part with Stéphanie. When her Flemish ears gathered from my French that I was starting for Zele and the school founded three years ago, which had been the talk of the region ever since, her eyes fairly spoke her eager desire. Seventy-eight and earning twenty cents a day, and yet consumed by a love for her art (for with her, lace-making is a true art), and a passion to learn more about it! I asked Mme. Coppens if Stéphanie might not come along in the car. In answer she began bustling about, tears in her eyes, to help get her ready, and Stéphanie in her odd little woolen cap could scarcely tie her long black-hooded cape because she was constantly throwing up her hands, and exclaiming, and pressing them together, as she tried to make me understand that in all her seventy-eight years she had only twice ridden in a wagon and never had she dreamed of being in an automobile before she died. What would the neighbors say? We bundled her into the corner of the car and were off, but she could not sit still, leaning forward to exclaim over the beauty of the snow, or a windmill, or the children skating in their sabots, or huddling down to cover her face with her hands in swift shyness if some one had seemed to see her; no spirit was ever so bubbling and gay and eager and timid all at once as Stéphanie’s as we rode through the snow toward Zele. Nor so patient as hers after we arrived; for instead of going to the school, I had to leave her in the car while I went to the house of the director, Dr. Armand Rubbens, unfortunately ill with rheumatism, who is not only the founder of the school but the inspiration of all the unusual accomplishments of the lace-workers of this town, where his father is Burgomaster. After her long wait, Stéphanie’s only comment as she looked a little fearfully at the gathering dusk, was: “It is not yet too late to see the school.” Inside, Dr. Rubbens, who since taking his university degree has not been strong enough to follow his profession, and has devoted himself to the 800 lace-workers of his district, explained the organization of the Zele “Trade Union Lace School,” founded three years ago and the only one of its kind in Belgium. I felt, as he talked, that he was reproducing in miniature a Henry Ford plant, and when I told him this, he smiled. “I begin to think I should see one of Mr. Ford’s factories, for in reading an account of his system in the Paris _Matin_ last week, I was astonished at the number of his ideas I had incorporated.”