A little to the north-east of Lille are two other large manufacturing towns in the midst of one of the busiest industrial districts of France. Roubaix[13] is the first of these, and Tourcoing[14] is the second. In Belgium, a few miles north-west of Tourcoing, is the much smaller industrial town of Menin,[15] which stands on the Lys where the main road from Bruges crosses the river on the way to Lille. North of the Lys we are in another world. We have left behind us the ugly pit mounds, the grimy towns, and the smoke of factories. We are now in West Flanders, in a countryside of market gardens, where every inch of ground is closely tilled, and the fields are laid out like a chessboard. There are many patches of woodland, some of them, such as the Forest of Houthulst, six or seven miles north of Ypres, being fairly large. West Flanders is not naturally fertile, but its dairy farmers and market gardeners, by dint of the greatest industry, have turned it into a rich and productive land. Six or seven hundred years ago its wealth came from a different source. Its cities were then bustling hives, in which most of the woollen cloth used in Europe was spun and woven. [Illustration: The Cloth Hall at Ypres before Bombardment.] The busiest and wealthiest of these cities was Ypres, which stands about twelve miles north of Armentières. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries there were some four hundred guilds of cloth manufacturers in the place, and its people numbered more than 200,000. So famous was its cloth that we find the English poet Chaucer[16] referring to it in his _Canterbury Tales_. His Wife of Bath, who was one of the pilgrims, was a cloth manufacturer, and Chaucer tells us that her wares "passed them of Ypres and of Gaunt" (Ghent). Before the war broke out Ypres was a little town of less than 18,000 people, and its industries were represented by its butter market and its small manufactures of lace and linen. But within it, as in the other ancient cities of Belgium, were some of the most glorious old buildings in all the world--the houses of the rich old burghers, the halls in which they met to transact their business, and the churches in which they thanked God for their prosperity. They spent their money lavishly on these buildings and filled them with treasures of art.