e punishment for such venial faults as dancing, gambling,
or the wearing of rich attire. The wine-cellars were rigidly closed.
Church property was declared public property, and it looked as if
private wealth would soon be similarly viewed. The peasants declared
that it was their mission to exterminate sin from the earth.

This tyranny so incensed the nobles and citizens that they rose in
self-defence, and Ziska, finding that Prague had grown too hot to hold
him, deemed it prudent to lead his men away. Sigismund took immediate
advantage of the opportunity by marching on Prague. But, quick as he
was, there were others quicker. The more moderate section of the
reformers, the so-called Horebites,--from Mount Horeb, another place of
assemblage,--entered the city, led by Hussinez, Huss's former lord, and
laid siege to the royal fortress, the Wisherad. Sigismund attempted to
surprise him, but met with so severe a repulse that he fled into
Hungary, and the Wisherad was forced to capitulate, this ancient palace
and its church, both splendid works of art, being destroyed. Step by
step the art and splendor of Bohemia were vanishing in this despotic
struggle between heresy and the papacy.

As the war went on, Ziska, its controlling spirit, grew steadily more
abhorrent of privilege and distinction, more bitterly fanatical. The
ancient church, royalty, nobility, all excited his wrath. He was
republican, socialist, almost anarchist in his views. His idea of
perfection lay in a fraternity composed of the children of God, while he
trusted to the strokes of the iron flail to bear down all opposition to
his theory of society. The city of Prachaticz treated him with mockery,
and was burnt to the ground, with all its inhabitants. The Bishop of
Nicopolis fell into his hands, and was flung into the river. As time
went on, his war of extermination against sinners--that is, all who
refused to join his banner--grew more cruel and unrelenting. Each city
that resisted was stormed and ruined, its inhabitants slaughtered, its
priests burned. Hussite virtue had degenerated into tyranny of the worst
type. Yet, while thus fanatical himself, Ziska would not permit his
followers to indulge in insane excesses of religious zeal. A party arose
which claimed that the millennium was at hand, and that it was their
duty to anticipate the coming of the innocence of Paradise, by going
naked, like Adam and Eve. These Adamites committed the maddest excesses,
but f