Here, too, Marlborough vanquished the French in 1708. I might go on for a dozen more pages citing the names of remarkable personages who gave fame to the town, which now is simply wiped from the landscape. But by some miracle, it is stated, the Town Hall still stands practically uninjured. I have tried in vain to substantiate this, or at least to obtain some data concerning it, but up to this writing my letters to various officials remain unanswered. I like to think of Oudenaarde as I last saw it--the huge black door of the church yawning like a gaping chasm, the square partly filled with devout peasants in holiday attire for the church fete, whatever it was. Part of the procession had passed beyond the gloom of the vast aisles into the frank openness of daylight. Between the walls of the small houses at either hand a long line of figures was marching with many silken banners. There seemed to be an interminable line of young girls--first communicants, I fancied,--in all the purity of their white veils and gowns against the somber dull grays of the church. This mass of pure white was of dazzling, startling effect, something like a great bed of white roses. [Illustration: Old Square and Church: Oudenaarde] Then came a phalanx of nuns clad in brown--I know not what their order was--their wide white cowls or coifs serving only to accentuate the pallor of their grave faces, veritable "incarnations of meek renunciation," as some poet has beautifully expressed it. Then followed a group of seminarians clad in the lace and scarlet of their order, swinging to and fro their brazen censers from which poured fragrant clouds of incense. All at once a curious murmur came from the multitude, followed by a great rustling, as the whole body of people sank to their knees, and then I saw beyond at a distance across the square, the archbishop's silken canopy, and beneath it a venerable figure with upraised arms, elevating the Host. Surely a moment of great picturesqueness, even to the non-participant; the bent heads of the multitude; the long lines of kneeling black figures; scarlet and gold and lace of the priests' robes against the black note of the nuns' somber draperies; the white coifs and veils, through which the sweet rapture of young religious awe made even homely features seem beautiful: the gold and scarlet again of the choristers; and finally, that culminating note of splendor beneath the silken canopy of the cardinal archbishop (Cardinal Mercier) enthroned here like some ancient venerated monarch; all this against the neutral gray and black lines of the townspeople; surely this was the psychological moment in which to leave Oudenaarde, that I might retain such a picture in my mind's eye. Furnes Furnes