s respect Prague is happily yet unspoilt. The born guide, when
young, is generally to be found running after you barefooted, clamouring
for coppers or cigarettes. His picturesqueness is due to the fact that
he does not disclose the incipient traits of villainy in his face by
washing it. The adult of the species does wash his face sometimes, but
he has no other virtues. The species "guide" is found in its perfection
in Southern Europe. Some day I must write a book on "Guides I have
Spurned"; there were many, and I have had to acquire a cursory
acquaintance with several foreign languages in order to deal adequately
with the spurning action which is chiefly vocal and invective. For the
present I can only remember one of the many spurned ones. He had been
following me about all over the ruins of a Moorish castle, and finally,
breathless, came up with me by a little pile of stones leaning, with
some faint attempt at symmetry, against a wall. In gusts a
garlic-charged voice explained, "Zat modern. Zat rabbit-'ouse!" In his
case the spurning could be done quite conveniently in English.

We cannot all afford to be original. I lay no claim to that quality for
myself; my method of making the acquaintance of such an interesting old
city as Prague may be that of thousands of other wayfarers. However this
may be, I propose to explain my method, not necessarily in order to
induce others to adopt it, but rather because it explains the title of
this work. I look upon cities, landscapes, in fact upon life in general,
from a terrace--not over or through the leaves of a guide-book.

There is a deal more interest in a terrace, and you can always find one
if you really want to do so, than the casual passer-by is inclined to
realize. It is easy to reconstruct the scene of building up the first
terrace. Some fairly primitive man had emancipated himself from the
old-fashioned ancestral habit of just letting the rain wash away the
hillside, and with it the family's prospects of green food for the
season. Squatting outside his cave he had done some hard thinking which,
transmitted into action, had led him to build up a wall here and there
on the hillside, a wall of clumsy stones kept in place by stakes
hammered into the ground, yet a wall, indeed a terrace, and an advance
upon the methods of his neighbours whose struggles he could watch from
the surer footing he himself had gained--a terrace and a point of view.

It is not suggested that the wa