Directly opposite is the north-west corner of the square, with the Palais de Justice on the right and the Hotel de Ville on the left.  Both date from the Spanish occupation, but they are very different in their style of architecture.  The first is classical and severe, the second has all the warmth of the Renaissance.  The Hotel de Ville is an elaborately decorated building, with two exquisite gables and a steep roof surmounted by a little octagonal tower.  The loggia below, standing out from the building and supporting a balcony above, is perhaps its most charming feature, both for the beauty of its proportions and the delicacy of its carved stone balustrades.  Inside, the rooms are as they were three hundred years ago, and the wonderful hangings of Cordova leather in the council chamber are still intact.  Beside the Hotel de Ville the straight lines of the Palais de Justice, with its pillars and its high narrow windows, form a striking contrast.  It was here, in the large room on the first floor, that the Inquisition held its awful court, and here were the instruments of torture with which it sought to enforce its will.  Behind the Palais rises the tall belfry, a big square tower from which springs an octagonal turret carrying an elaborate campanile.  There is a quaint survival on this belfry, for upon it the town crier has a little hut.  He is a cobbler, and from below one can hear the tap-tap of his hammer as he plies his trade.  But at night he calls out the hours to the town below, together with any information of interest, concluding with the assurance that he and his wife are in good health.  The office has descended from father to son from the earliest days of the history of Furnes, and its holder has always been a cobbler.  Till early in last November the record was unbroken, but, alas the fear of German shells was too much for the cobbler, and he is gone.

Furnes is a town of contrasts, and though both its churches were built by the wonderful architects of the fourteenth century, there could hardly be two buildings more diverse.  Behind the line of red roofs on the east of the square rises the rugged tower of St. Nicholas, a great square mass of old and weather-beaten brick, unfinished like so many of the Belgian towers, but rough, massive, and grand, like some rude giant.  On the north, behind the Palais de Justice and the belfry, stands St. Walburga, with the delicate tracery of her flying buttresses and her spire fine as a needle.  There is something fitting in the rugged simplicity which commemorates the grand old Bishop, and in the exquisite fragility of the shrine of the virgin saint.  The double flying buttresses of St. Walburga, intersecting in mid-air, and apparently defying the laws of gravity, are as delicate a dream as the mind of architect could conceive, and they give to the whole an airy grace which cannot be described.  The church was planned six hundred years ago on a gigantic scale, in the days when men built for the worship of God and not