But above all and before all, first and foremost, pride and heart of the city as it was its centre, rose the fair square tower of the Cloth Hall, with its four richly decorated pinnacles in the Gothic style and great golden clock. The heavy hand of the nineteenth-century restorer, taking his cue from the smug iconoclasts of Victoria and Louis Philippe, had played havoc with the interior rooms, great, lofty halls with fine old wooden roofing. The walls had been decorated with frescoes in the best “Sham Castle” style, illustrating the history of the city. But nothing, not even the modern statues set in niches to replace the statues destroyed by the armies of the _Directoire_, could spoil the majestic harmony, the perfection of line, of the great three-storied façade with its corner-turrets, a vast towering front such as you might have seen nowhere else in the world. The years that have gone “with the old world to the grave,” as Henley sang, swept all the horrors of warfare over Ypres, yet the city survived. Often in bygone days the sky above Ypres had reddened with the flames of the buildings set alight by the conqueror, while the narrow streets ran with the blood of the hapless inhabitants massacred by a ruthless victor. Popular riots, fighting between the nobles and the Guilds, an awful visitation of the Black Death--the same plague that ravaged England in the fourteenth century and affected our entire national life as deeply as Magna Carta itself--and a succession of sieges, destroyed the one-time commercial supremacy of Ypres. Over against the Lille Gate of the city there still stands, amid the rack and ruin of to-day, a humble little house with a gabled front of timber, probably the most ancient building in the city, that has witnessed most of the exciting happenings of Ypres’ storied past: the burning of the outlying parts of the town by the English and the burghers of Ghent in 1383; the devastations of the Iconoclasts, most fantastic of sects, in 1566; the sack of the city by the Gueux in 1578; its capture by the soldiers of Alexander Farnese in 1584; and by the French, who obtained possession of Ypres four times in the seventeenth century and held it until 1715. Harried by fire and sword, the Ypres weavers fled from their homes, and many came to England, where the so-called Wipers Tower at Rye is, I believe, a token of the hospitality they received in our islands. Now once again, after many centuries, the hand of fate has bound together the threads of England and the ancient Flemish town so close that, as long as England endures, the name of Ypres shall signify a stern ordeal bravely borne and willing faithfulness even unto death.