Malines (mah-leen), called Mechlin in Flemish, betrays wounds inflicted during three weeks’ bombardment. It has wide fame for its lace and its cathedral pictures, and for its amazing clock tower. When it was begun in the year 1452, the architect of the tower intended to make it “the highest in Christendom”; but he never reached what we may call the height of his ambition. The square, unfinished structure rises magnificently 318 feet above the street, but does not approach by 200 feet the lofty tower of the Cathedral of Ulm, in the kingdom of Württemberg. [Illustration: THE CATHEDRAL OF ST. ROMBOLD, MALINES (MECHLIN) Height of the tower, 318 feet] [Illustration: THE WATERFRONT, ANTWERP The Cathedral of Notre Dame in the center background] The site of Antwerp, fifty miles inland from the North Sea, on a wide curve of the Scheldt (skelt), has been coveted and assailed, built and rebuilt upon since the dawn of European civilization. No city has a more affluent history, nor one that contains gloomier chronicles of siege and warfare. Its wharves and its narrow streets, bulked by the over-watching citadel and the flamboyant tower of one of the finest churches in Belgium, are teeming with wharfmongers and brokers, dealers in diamonds and ivory, lace-makers, flower vendors, factory-workers. One sees many artists, too, for the Academy of Antwerp is attended by hundreds of students, attracted to the “city on the wharf” by the unequaled opportunities presented for the study of Flemish masters, ancient and modern, whose works are exhibited in the Cathedral of Notre Dame and in the vast galleries of the Royal Museum of Fine Arts. [Illustration: INTERIOR OF THE LIBRARY, UNIVERSITY OF LOUVAIN Its store of irreplaceable manuscripts and books (230,000 in number) were wantonly burned by the Germans. The University, also destroyed, was revered for its association with the names of Erasmus, Justus Lipsius, and other renowned scholars] In the sixteenth-century rooms of the master printers, Christopher Plantin and his son-in-law, John Moretus, we examine the yellowed manuscripts of aspiring authors of that day; presses and proof-sheets; wood-cut designs by Rubens, and the original shop where generations of printers turned out excellent books by grant of the Crown, including the precious and far renowned Polyglot Bible.