All this is most fascinating, and, as far as it goes, helps us to reconstruct in fancy the great days of the past. The disappointing feature about the palace is the museum itself, which, although interesting and valuable, utterly spoils many of the fine rooms by converting them into mere exhibition places. In a measure the authorities have followed the admirable plan of the owners of the Hotel Merghelynck at Ypres, and the immense kitchen, for example, contains only kitchen utensils of the Middle Ages--a most complete and interesting collection. The same is also true of the large dining-room on the same floor, but as one proceeds farther the atmosphere of antiquity becomes lost and it is all nothing but museum. The palace contains a splendid collection of old lace, the gift of the Baroness Liedts, but it seemed to us that it would have been much better to have housed this and the various collections of antiquities in some less famous and historic structure and endeavoured to restore all of these rooms to approximately their condition when Charles the Bold stalked through them. The period of Philip the Good and his terrible son was the one in which mediæval Bruges took on substantially its present form. In addition to the Gruuthuise Palace scores of important edifices, public and private, were built or rebuilt at this time, while hundreds of smaller houses were constructed--of which many remain in existence to-day. The greatest and most famous edifice dating in large part from this epoch is the cathedral of St. Sauveur whose grim, castle-like tower dominates the entire city. The lowest part of the tower dates from 1116-1127--as already related in the chapter on Bruges under Charles the Good--when the church was rebuilt after a fire that destroyed the primitive structure erected on the site a century or more earlier. Between 1250 and 1346, or for almost a century, the men of Bruges were slowly piling up a noble church in the early Gothic style, but another fire in 1358 necessitated rebuilding the nave and transept--a task which occupied the next ten or fifteen years. In 1480 work was begun upon the five chapels of the choir and nine years later the Pope, Innocent VIII, granted a special Bull of Indulgence in favour of benefactors of this work, which appears to have been delayed for lack of funds. Work of various kinds was continued until the middle of the sixteenth century, but, in the main, the great church was nearly as we see it now by the year 1511. The upper part of the tower is comparatively modern, dating from 1846, and the spire from 1871. While it has been criticised by some as ungainly and cumbrous, the effect of this tower, from whatever angle it may be viewed, is very pleasing. The high lights and shadows on a sunny morning, or late in the afternoon, make it far more beautiful than its sister of Notre Dame, while against the grey cloud masses of a typical Flemish sky its