During the two centuries which had elapsed since the commencement of this great church the ground around it had gradually risen by reason of numerous interments to a very considerable distance above the pavement; hence the church was always cold and damp, and in wet weather not unfrequently flooded. To remedy this, it was decided early in the fifteen hundreds, to erect a new choir with a crypt beneath it in such a manner that the pavement of the upper building should be on a considerably higher level than the ground outside. Kelderman and De Waghemakere prepared the plans, and in due course the Emperor himself laid the foundation stone. For nearly ten years they worked at the new structure, and then came the catastrophe which sooner or later almost always frustrated Kelderman's most strenuous endeavours: a fire broke out which wrought such havoc on the main body of the cathedral that the repairs absorbed alike the money and the material which had gradually been amassed for the building of the new choir. Thus was the ambitious scheme of these two great architects nipped, so to speak, in the bud, for ambitious scheme it undoubtedly was: if it had been carried out Antwerp would have possessed a cathedral vaster and, if contemporary witnesses are to be trusted, more beautiful than any other city in Christendom. Of this we have no means of judging, for though the plans were carefully treasured among the city rolls for some two hundred years, at last they mysteriously disappeared. There was reason to believe they had been stolen, and though every effort was made to trace them, from that day to this they have never been found; but of the vast proportions of the proposed edifice there can be no manner of doubt, the foundations still exist, and here and there they are visible. Moreover, a few years ago, there was discovered, hidden away in the archive chamber, a contemporary sketch of the ground plan, from which it appears that Kelderman's choir would have occupied a surface just twice as large as that covered by the actual choir including the ambulatory and the chevet. Now Antwerp Cathedral in its present state is not one of mean dimensions: it is somewhat longer than Westminster Abbey, without the lady chapel, and exceeds it in breadth at the transepts by over ten feet and at the nave by no less than a hundred. [Illustration: QUAI DE L'AVOINE, MALINES.]