Nearer the mouth of the Yser was Nieuport, the "new port" made when the harbour of Lombaertzyde across the river filled with sand during a terrific storm in the twelfth century. Part of the way the road along the embankment ran just over the sea, and the rest of the time behind the dunes. It was a quaint old town with some really fine Gothic buildings, hidden by its sheltering mounds of sand from the hotels and villas of the beach, which is called Nieuport-Bains to distinguish the resort from its moribund neighbour. This is far from being Nieuport's first experience of war. It was destroyed in 1383, after withstanding nine sieges. A hundred years later it was successfully defended against the French, the women and even the children fighting side by side with the men. It was destroyed again in the seventeen hundreds--three times, in fact. Whether it will rise again, the world will wait to see. A brave little town among its gray-green sand dunes, with its ancient lighthouse and its empty, echoing square. A few miles west along the coast was Furnes, whose history begins in the Dark Ages and finishes--in 1914. It was quite of a piece with the other dead little towns of the Yser country, so far as one could see, but distinguished from them all by its strange celebration, the Procession of Penance. [Illustration: _Sand Dunes, Nieuport_] This was held every year on the last Sunday in July, and was one of the last remaining Christian mysteries. The procession represented the life of Jesus. It is supposed to have been instituted by that Count of Flanders who was also King of Jerusalem, for the purpose of carrying about the streets of Furnes a splinter from the Cross, which he had brought back from the Holy Land. For a while other mysteries were added, but it finally began to degenerate until by the seventeenth century it had become a sort of burlesque. A brotherhood was founded to restore it to its primitive form, but a new motive entered into it when two soldiers profaned some concentrated wafers and had to do penance in public. In this manner the modern penitential procession originated. The procession formed within the church of Sainte Walburge. Outside, the horses of the Roman soldiers pranced about while Mary sat on an ass waiting for the flight to Egypt. Then slowly forth from the church came the penitents, robed and cowled in brown, their faces masked, dragging after them the carts bearing the stable of Bethlehem, the Holy Sepulcher, the Resurrection, and the Ascension. Following them came many rosy-cheeked girls veiled in white.