Here is an old treasure-house full of wonders, and it can be touched upon lightly, if at all, for it demands a volume to itself. It has a dozen churches, all of the deepest interest; the Cathedral of St. Bavon, St. Nicholas, St. Michael, St. Jacques, standing to the front. All suffered from the Protestants and the French Revolution, and some from the mishandling of restorers, but they retain their individuality, which is very marked, for one and all are very local variants of the styles one finds elsewhere; they are of Ghent and of no other place. Brick is used widely, as elsewhere in Flanders, either by itself or mingled with stone; and it is used with that intelligence, so rare in modern times, that indicates the possibility of adapting a style to the materials through which it is expressed. Of course, then art was as living a thing as religion and the realities of liberty, whereas now they all fall in the category of those fictions that please while they do not persuade--which makes all the difference in the world. All Flanders is a lesson in the use of brick, and as it is used here in St. Nicholas, and in the houses of the Quai aux Herbes, as it was used in lost Louvain, in desolated Ypres, in battered Malines, it was a study in good art, a lesson in the history of human culture, a demonstration of the perfect adaptation of modest means to a very noble end. Ghent must have been a city of indescribable beauty about the middle of the sixteenth century before its dark days began and one scourge after [Illustration: A CANAL IN MALINES] another followed the Reformers with their combination of dull brutality, insane self-sufficiency, and savage fury of destruction. Even now the group of towers, St. Bavon, St. Nicholas, and the belfry with its “Great Bell Roland”--though the original spires are gone and the belfry has further suffered the indignity of an extinguisher cap of iron--gives some faint idea of what must have been before coal and iron came, first to destroy and then most hideously to re-create. So also does the towering old castle give a hint, whether you see it from the Place Ste. Pharailde or from the canal, with its great buttresses lifting out of the water; so does the unfinished but sumptuous Hôtel de Ville with its fretted bays and balconied turrets; so do the beautiful ruins of the ancient abbey shrouded in vines and trees. Life in a mediæval city such as this could have left little to be desired so far as beauty of environment was concerned, and when this contained within itself unspoliated, unrestored churches that were in use all the time and meant something besides a seventh-day respectability, and a great bell in a tall tower, around whose rim were the words, “My name is Roland. When I toll there is fire; when I ring there is victory in Flanders,” it is easy to see how men could and did paint such pictures as “The Adoration of the Lamb That Was Slain.”