Our visit to Prague we were compelled to lengthen somewhat. Prague is
one of the most interesting towns in Europe. Its stones are saturated
with history and romance; its every suburb must have been a battlefield.
It is the town that conceived the Reformation and hatched the Thirty
Years' War. But half Prague's troubles, one imagines, might have been
saved to it, had it possessed windows less large and temptingly
convenient. The first of these mighty catastrophes it set rolling by
throwing the seven Catholic councillors from the windows of its Rathhaus
on to the pikes of the Hussites below. Later, it gave the signal for the
second by again throwing the Imperial councillors from the windows of the
old Burg in the Hradschin--Prague's second "Fenstersturz." Since, other
fateful questions have been decide in Prague, one assumes from their
having been concluded without violence that such must have been discussed
in cellars. The window, as an argument, one feels, would always have
proved too strong a temptation to any true-born Praguer.

In the Teynkirche stands the worm-eaten pulpit from which preached John
Huss. One may hear from the selfsame desk to-day the voice of a Papist
priest, while in far-off Constance a rude block of stone, half ivy
hidden, marks the spot where Huss and Jerome died burning at the stake.
History is fond of her little ironies. In this same Teynkirche lies
buried Tycho Brahe, the astronomer, who made the common mistake of
thinking the earth, with its eleven hundred creeds and one humanity, the
centre of the universe; but who otherwise observed the stars clearly.

Through Prague's dirty, palace-bordered alleys must have pressed often in
hot haste blind Ziska and open-minded Wallenstein--they have dubbed him
"The Hero" in Prague; and the town is honestly proud of having owned him
for citizen. In his gloomy palace in the Waldstein-Platz they show as a
sacred spot the cabinet where he prayed, and seem to have persuaded
themselves he really had a soul. Its steep, winding ways must have been
choked a dozen times, now by Sigismund's flying legions, followed by
fierce-killing Tarborites, and now by pale Protestants pursued by the
victorious Catholics of Maximilian. Now Saxons, now Bavarians, and now
French; now the saints of Gustavus Adolphus, and now the steel fighting
machines of Frederick the Great, have thundered at its gates and fought
upon its bridges.

The Jews have always been an importa