[2] Mr. N. E. Monckton Jones, formerly tutor in Modern History in the University of Liverpool, in a letter to the _Observer_, thus describes the impression made by the first sight of the building: "Turning perforce with the street at right angles, we passed into a narrower, more winding, one with more old gabled houses, and here and there a fine sculptured moulding or portal. Then of a sudden we were at the Place, and the Cloth Hall in all its full glory before us. It was not the size of the building nor its richness that halted us so abruptly and made us all eyes for the moment. It was, I think, the arresting dignity of it, a dignity built up of fine and simple lines and the mellow contentment of age. Many buildings in other towns were statelier, more ornate, more imposing, but from the pointed arcade below to the long line of the great roof the Hall told of a fine sense of proportion, of reserve. Its builders did not aim at outdoing other men, but they knew what they needed, and would have it seemly, and by sheer reiteration of a simple plan well conceived they made homely simplicity glorious. The Cloth Hall expressed the self-respect of burghers who had won their rights two centuries before Magna Carta." Besides the Cloth Hall, however, and the fine cathedral dedicated to St. Martin, the former importance of Ypres was shown in its wide and elegant streets, bordered by antique Flemish mansions, abodes of an old world tranquillity, and with interiors like pictures. The most pleasantly situated perhaps of all the Flemish cities, Ypres was a favourite place of residence, an urban cameo set amid woods and hills of broad and sweeping yet softened outline, round about it a ring of peaceful villages, and the private seats of old-time and settled wealth. If this was the ancient capital of Flanders, the scene on the farther side of the crescent of hills across the valley of the Lys presented the most striking of contrasts. In that direction the background of the picture was a forest of tall chimneys--the great city of Lille overhung by its cloud of smoke. The foreground was an apparent tangle of railways, roads, canals, brickworks, industrial villages, mills, dyeworks, machine shops, the multitudinous aspects in short of industry as it exists to-day, superposed upon the ancient Flemish features of the countryside--its spacious farms, its sluggish rivers, and its everlasting flatness.