It was not until the seventeenth century that Flanders began to place these wondrous collections of bells in her great towers, which seem to have been built for them. Thus came the carillons of Malines, Bruges, Ghent, Antwerp, Louvain, and Tournai. Of these, Antwerp possessed the greatest in number, sixty-five bells. Malines came next with forty-four, then Bruges with forty, and a great bourdon or bass bell; then Tournai and Louvain with forty, and finally Ghent with thirty-nine. In ancient times these carillons were played by hand on a keyboard, called a _clavecin_. In the belfry at Bruges, in a dusty old chamber with a leaden floor, I found a very old _clavecin_. It was simply a rude keyboard much like that of a primitive kind of organ, presenting a number of jutting handles, something like rolling pins, each of which was attached to a wire operating the hammer, in the bell chamber overhead, which strikes the rim of the bells. There was an old red, leather-covered bench before this machine on which the performer sat, and it must have been a task requiring considerable strength and agility so to smite each of these pins with his gloved fist, his knees and each of his feet (on the foot board) that the hammers above would fall on the rims of the different bells. From my room in the old "Panier d'or" in the market-place on many nights have I watched the tower against the dim sky, and seen the light of the "_veilleur_," shining in the topmost window, where he keeps watch over the sleeping town, and sounds two strokes upon a small bell after each quarter is struck, to show that he is on watch. And so passed the time in this peaceful land until that fatal day in August, 1914. Dixmude Dixmude There is no longer a Grand' Place at Dixmude. Of the town, the great squat church of St. Martin, and the quaint town hall adjoining it, now not one stone remains upon another. The old mossy walls and bastion are level with the soil, and even the course of the small sluggishly flowing river Yser is changed by the ruin that chokes it.