The cathedral has suffered constantly and at the hands of many kinds of unscrupulous vandals. The “Reformers” in the sixteenth century pillaged it and wrecked its gilded shrines and its ancient glass; the Revolutionists continued the dread work in the eighteenth century, and a hundred years later blundering efforts to reinforce it by crude masses of masonry were succeeded by equally blundering efforts at restoration. It has, however, preserved and gathered together many treasures of Catholic art, including chasubles of St. Thomas à Becket, Flemish tapestries, ivory carvings, embroidered altar frontals, metal work, and mediæval missals. There are many other fine old churches in Tournai--St. Jacques, St. Quentin, St. Nicholas, St. Brice--all with elements of interest, while the ancient Cloth Hall contains a most valuable collection of mediæval art-work of all kinds, and the older streets still preserve fine dwellings and guild-houses of the Middle Ages and early Renaissance. Audenaarde is all old, and it lies some five and twenty miles down the slow-winding Scheldt on its roundabout and unhurried way to Ghent and Antwerp and the sea. Once also it was a great city, now it is a village of six or seven thousand souls, for it has fortunately never recovered its prosperity under the new and unhandsome conditions that marked the nineteenth century, as happened in the case of Brussels and Antwerp and Ghent. In earlier days it was famous, like Arras, for its tapestries, and many of those exquisite fifteenth-century masterpieces that are now exiled in alien museums where they do not belong, but where at least their value is appreciated and estimated at almost their weight in gold, came from its looms. Tapestries are made here no more, nor in any other place, for their art was of a peculiar subtlety that, even if it finds appreciation amongst stray connoisseurs and curators, is as far beyond the powers of the present day and generation as the glass of Chartres or the sculptures of Reims. Linen and cotton weaving and the brewing of beer have taken the place of tapestries in Audenaarde, but the old town itself is little harmed thereby. From the large and pious and opulent days of the later Middle Ages, there remain in Audenaarde a very splendid great hall and two equally great churches of rather unusual value. The hall is early sixteenth century, very rich and equally graceful, with a slender tower and spire, ending in a great crown as did the now-shattered tower of Arras. Its rooms are very splendid, with big carved chimneypieces of the most elaborate design, and with its small size and scrupulous detail it ranks with Bruges and Arras and in advance of the more ambitious creations of Brussels and Ghent.