refectory and the eastern façade of the main building, and the other two by beautiful crenelated walls with a slender and very graceful turret at their angle. The tower and spire which called forth the admiration of Van Maele sprang from the side of the main building, which gave on the courtyard, and for the rest, towers, turrets, chimneys were everywhere adorned with graceful panelling or dainty Gothic tracery in moulded brick. All this splendour is among the things which have been. Only a fragment of the old palace now remains: the main building, shorn of its tower, its pinnacles, and its upper storeys, and there is now nothing left to indicate its glory of former days. This piece of vandalism was committed about a hundred years ago, when the prosperity of the city of Bruges was at its lowest ebb. The proprietor at that time was without the means of keeping so extensive and costly a mansion in repair, and the city fathers either could not or would not come to his assistance. It was not only, however, by these public or semi-public buildings that Bruges was enriched during the period we are now considering. At this time, and more especially during the long peace of over thirty years which followed the great humiliation of 1437, there appears to have been a veritable mania for construction. From Duke Philip himself to the meanest householder in Bruges, every man seems to have been afflicted with it. [Illustration: Hooded Fire Place in the Gruthuise] Those of the great burgher-nobles who already possessed palaces enlarged and embellished them; the new men who had recently amassed fortunes vied with the old aristocracy in the magnificence and luxury of the mansions which they now built; plain, well-to-do merchants were everywhere constructing those roomy, comfortable abodes, which, with their high stepped gables and their façades enriched with stately panelling and Gothic tracery, still render the streets and squares and waterways of Bruges the most picturesque in Europe. Even working men, humble members of the great guilds of smiths, or masons, or carpenters, were making their homes beautiful with the fruit of their handicraft; constructing canopied niches at street corners, or over the doorways of the hovels in which they lived, and placing in them graven images of Our Lady or of some favourite saint; hammering out exquisite lanterns, which it was their delight to hang before them, from brackets of no less dainty fashion; fabricating, of wrought-iron, those quaintly beautiful trade signs by which it was their wont to call attention to their avocations; making door, and lintel, and chimney, and rafter comely with fruit and foliage, fascinating with heraldic devices, and grotesque and leering heads, and the images of devils and of saints. Much of this work has of course disappeared, but some of it still remains to bear witness to the skill and the energy and the devotion of these poor toilers.