Unlike most tourists, the Professor seemed to be in no hurry to inspect the famous Belfry, although we had passed it a score of times during our stay. Facing the Grande Place, and towering three hundred and fifty-three feet into the air, it could not be overlooked, while its loud chimes--which rang every quarter of an hour, and can be heard for many blocks around--insured that it could not be forgotten. Moreover, we more than once took our evening meal at a little restaurant just across the Place from it and saw its graceful octagonal parapet on one occasion outlined against the fast-flying grey clouds of a summer storm and the next day against the blue sky of one of the few perfect June days it was our fortune to enjoy. "Too soon," he said, in answer to our inquiring glances--"the Belfry belongs to the period of Bruges' splendour, while the buildings we have seen thus far date from the formative period when she was still little more than a fortress on a marsh." The original structure dates from the very early Counts of Flanders--possibly from the time of the first Baldwin--but was practically destroyed by a fire in the year 1280. It was then that the present edifice was begun, at a period when the commercial and industrial importance of the city was already very great. The city's seal and archives were stored in a strong room within the belfry walls, where four wrought iron doors secured by ten locks and ten keys guarded them against abstraction by the emissaries of some Count who might desire to curtail the privileges of the city. Eight of these keys were kept by the deans of the eight leading guilds--the butchers, bakers, shoemakers, tailors, weavers, brokers, carpenters and blacksmiths--who thus virtually controlled the government. This room the Professor desired to see above all else in the old structure. We found the four wrought iron doors, but the archive chamber no longer contains archives or the city's seal. It was a most interesting old room, nevertheless, and one that ought to particularly interest the builders of the elaborate burglar-proof and earthquake-proof vaults that extend below so many great banking houses in America. Alas! neither the four doors nor the ten locks rendered this ancient strong-room for the protection of the city's liberties proof against the cunning and power of tyrants, and the precious charters it once held were gradually taken away, despite the stout handiwork of one Erembald, blacksmith, who received eighty-one pounds for forging the doors in the year 1290.