(ii) since I should never remember what they said, it is useless my even letting it in at one ear.  The kindly, cobwebby old person who piloted me among those wonderful kings’ graves in Cracow was personally not uninteresting, indeed a fine study, and his rigmaroles brought up infallibly upon three words which I could not fail to notice:  these were “silberner Sarg vergoldet” (silver coffin, gilded).  It had an odd fascination for me this phrase, as I stood always waiting for it; why, I wondered, should anybody want to gild a good solid silver coffin?

At the time of my first visit, the excavation necessary to form the crypt for the resting-place of Mickiewicz[18] was in progress, and I went in among the limey, dusty workmen, with their tallow candles, and looked round.  In return for my gulden, the beadle gave me a few immortelles from Sobieski’s tomb, and some laurel leaves from Kosciuszko’s; and remembering friends at home of refinedly ghoulish tastes, I determined to preserve those poor moldering fragments for them.

Most of my days and evenings I spent wandering by the Vistula and in and out of the hundred churches.  My plan was to sight a spire, and then walk to the root of it, so to speak.  In this manner I saw the town very well.  The houses were of brick and plaster, the rich carmine-red brick that has made Cracow so beautiful.  On each was a beautiful facade, and pediments in renaissance, bas-relief work of cupids, and classic figures with ribands and roses tying among them, seeming to speak, somehow, of the dead princes and the mighty aristocracy which had cost Cracow so dear.

In the Jews’ quarter that loud lifelong market of theirs was going forward, which required seemingly only some small basinfuls of sour Gurken and a few spoonfuls of beans of its stock-in-trade.  Mingling among the Jews were the peasants, of course; the men in tightly fitting trousers of white blanket cloth, rich embroidered on the upper part and down the seams in blue and red; the women wearing pink printed muslin skirts, often with a pale blue muslin apron and a lemon-colored fine wool cloth, spotted in pink, upon the head.  They manifested a great appreciation of color, but none of form, and after the free dress of the Hucal women, these people, mummied in their red tartan shawls—­all hybrid Stewarts, they seemed to me—­were merely bright bundles in the sunshine.

In the shops in Cracow, French was nearly always the language of attack, and a good deal was spoken in the hotel.  I had occasion to buy a great many things, but, according to my custom, not a photograph was among them; therefore, when I go back, I shall receive perfectly new and fresh impressions of the place, and can cherish no vague memories, encouraged by an album at home, in which the nameless cathedrals of many countries confuse themselves, and only the Coliseum at Rome stands forth, not to be contradicted or misnamed.