ar set of descriptions by heart, which he went
through with a great flourish, pointing particularly to the common
military caps of the late Emperors of Prussia and Austria, as "treasures
beyond all price to the nation!" Whereupon, the crowd of common people
gazed reverently on the shabby beavers, and I verily believe, would have
devoutly kissed them, had the glass covering been removed. I happened to
be next to a tall, dignified young man, who looked on all this with a
displeasure almost amounting to contempt. Seeing I was a foreigner, he
spoke, in a low tone, bitterly of the Austrian government. "You are not
then an Austrian?" I asked. "No, thank God!" was the reply: "but I have
seen enough of Austrian tyranny. I am a Pole!"

The first wing contains banners used in the French Revolution, and
liberty trees with the red cap; the armor of Rudolph of Hapsburg,
Maximilian I., the Emperor Charles V., and the hat, sword and order of
Marshal Schwarzenberg. Some of the halls represent a fortification, with
walls, ditches and embankments, made of muskets and swords. A long room
in the second wing contains an encampment, in which twelve or fifteen
large tents are formed in like manner. Along the sides are grouped old
Austrian banners, standards taken from the French, and horsetails and
flags captured from the Turks. "They make a great boast," said the Pole,
"of a half dozen French colors, but let them go to the Hospital des
Invalides, in Paris, and they will find _hundreds_ of the best banners
of Austria!" They also exhibited the armor of a dwarf king of Bohemia
and Hungary, who died, a gray-headed old man, in his twentieth year; the
sword of Marlborough; the coat of Gustavus Adolphus, pierced in the
breast and back with the bullet which killed him at Lutzen; the armor of
the old Bohemian princess Libussa, and that of the amazon Wlaska, with a
steel visor made to fit the features of her face. The last wing was the
most remarkable. Here we saw the helm and breastplate of Attila, king of
the Huns, which once glanced at the head of his myriads of wild hordes,
before the walls of Rome; the armor of Count Stahremberg, who commanded
Vienna during the Turkish siege in 1529, and the holy banner of Mahomet,
taken at that time from the Grand Vizier, together with the steel
harness of John Sobieski of Poland, who rescued Vienna from the Turkish
troops under Kara Mustapha; the hat, sword and breastplate of Godfrey of
Bouillon, the Crusader-ki