which, still smothered in whitewash in 1910, was remarkable for
its florid Gothic rood-screen and soaring Tabernacle, or Ciborium.
The stumpy fragment of tower at the west end is said once to have
been five hundred and thirty feet high! It is not surprising to
read that this last, and crowning, manifestation of a familiar
Belgian weakness was largely wrecked by a hurricane in 1604.





IV.


One has left oneself all too little space to say what ought to be
said of the Belgian Ardennes. Personally I find them a trifle
disappointing; they come, no doubt, as a welcome relief after the
rest of Belgian landscape, which I have heard described, not
altogether unjustly, as the ugliest in the world; but the true
glory and value of Belgium will always be discovered in its
marvellously picturesque old towns, and in its unrivalled wealth
of painting, brass-work, and wood-carving. Compared with these
last splendours the low, wooded wolds of the Ardennes, with their
narrow limestone valleys, seem a little thing indeed. Dinant, no
doubt, and Rochefort would be pleasant places enough if one were
not always harking back in memory to Malines and Ypres, or longing
to be once more in Ghent or Bruges.

The traveller by railway between Brussels and Liege passes, soon
after leaving the station of Ans, a point of great significance in