All the stirring past of Ypres, once wealthiest and most powerful city of Flanders, was outlined in the noble buildings thrusting their heads up out of the undulating plain. Built in a sparsely populated region, there was no city, far and wide, to compare with the beauty, the luxury, and wealth of Ypres. It stood proudly alone, superbly beautiful among ugly surroundings, its ramparts all about, a broad moat where swans glided idly among the water-lilies on the one side, the Yser Canal, bearing trade to Ostend on its sluggish waters, on the other. Ypres feared no comparison with the cities far about. Neither Courtrai nor Menin nor Lille nor Béthune nor St. Omer, nor even Arras, could match with this perfect jewel of old Flemish civilization. Square and solid to the four winds of heaven, which in winter blow lustily across these mournful plains, stood the Gothic tower of the Cathedral of St. Martin, where Bishop Jansen, most renowned of heretics, sleeps his untroubled sleep in the shadow of the high-altar. Near by rose the massive red-brick keep of the Abbey of Thérouanne, last survival of a powerful and wealthy foundation transferred to Ypres when Elizabeth ruled in England. The lofty Renaissance roof of St. Nicholas, the graceful spire of St. Pierre, the high fabric of St. Jacques, looked down from other parts of the city on the ancient gabled houses clinging close together in the narrow cobbled streets. The splendid old houses of the Ypres guilds, rich and independent and free, told of the days when the cloth-makers and lace-workers of Ypres were renowned throughout Europe, before pestilence and internal dissension and wars dethroned the city from its high estate. There was a delightful intimacy in this old-world Flemish city. Even in the names of the streets you saw it--the Street of Paradise, a narrow thread of an opening between two ancient gabled houses with a glimpse of waving foliage at the end; the Street of the Pots, where doubtless the tinsmiths once sat and hammered before their shop-doors; the Street of the Mice, survival of some legend of the Middle Ages; the Street of the Moon, derived probably from a shop or inn sign. A fine old almshouse, with gaudily painted statues in niches on the outside, the _Hospice Belle_, a refuge for old women founded in the days of the Plantagenets by a pious noblewoman of Ypres, Christine de Guines, stood in the Rue de Lille, a perfect background to a Jan Steen or Pieter Brueghel painting. In every street the elaborately decorated fronts and carved doors were silent witness of centuries of prosperity and ease, the fatal fat years that brought ruin to Belgium.