The fifty advanced workers in the atelier (there are 140 apprentices) share the profit of the lace sales in proportion to their wages, and own part of the stock of the union. The best workers of this group make twenty-five centimes an hour, or two and a half francs (fifty cents) a day of eight hours, the highest pay I know of, so far, gained by a lace-maker. The girls may go four hours each week to a school of domestic science, without losing pay; there are illness and pension funds, and other provisions for the health and protection of the members of the school. Dr. Rubbens has seemed to accept every opportunity as a privilege. [Illustration: AT WORK ON DETAILS OF A NEEDLE-POINT SCARF TO BE PRESENTED TO QUEEN ELIZABETH] [Illustration: NEEDLE LACE CLASS-ROOM IN THE TRADE UNION LACE SCHOOL AT ZELE] I looked over the files and photographs and records, for even tho Zele is a remote town of but 6,000 inhabitants, this wide-awake director has made it provide for him a better set of records and announcement and advertising cards (some of them in English) than I have seen anywhere else in Belgium. While I was inspecting the books, he opened a chest and spread on the table a finished model from his school—a Needle Point scarf or veil, sown with marguerites and varied by a bewildering succession of open-work stitches, each seemingly more exquisite than the preceding and some of them invented for this particular veil. The needle-workers who had made it had given about 9,000 hours to its flowers and gauze, and it would bring 3,000 francs to the Trade Union treasury. [Illustration: NEEDLE-POINT ILLUSTRATION FOR THE FABLE OF THE FOX AND THE GRAPES] [Illustration: IN THE ZELE LACE SCHOOL; JOINING DETAILS OF THE NEEDLE-POINT SCARF PRESENTED TO QUEEN ELIZABETH] I felt that I must fetch Stéphanie to see this, but Dr. Rubbens advised hurrying now to the school, where there was something still more beautiful to be seen—the scarf just completed that will be presented to Queen Elizabeth, and so far the _chef-d’œuvre_ of the Zele lace-makers. I told Stéphanie about it on our way through the village. Once arrived, we went directly to the most advanced class, where Stéphanie might find most to interest her. The young women were at work on Needle Point collars and medallions, a series of tableaux from the legend of the Fox and the Grapes, and she was all eyes and ears as she went eagerly from chair to chair, trying to see what these girls had been taught that she had missed learning, and to add to her lore, if she could. I believe it is only in such a modern school as this that an outsider would have been allowed to examine, as Stéphanie did, the stitches and patterns, for the tradition of the locked door and the carefully guarded secret still prevails in the lace word.