But it became necessary to put a period to my wandering, unless I wished to find myself stranded in Vienna with “neither cross nor pile.”  The references to money-matters have been designedly slight throughout these pages.  It is not my habit to keep accounts.  I have never found that you get any money back by knowing just how you have spent it, and a conscience-pricking record of expenses is very ungrateful reading.  So, when a certain beautiful evening came, I felt that I had to look upon it as my last.  Being too early for the train, I bid the man drive about in the early summer dark for three-quarters of an hour.

To such as do not care for precise information and statistics in foreign places, but appreciate rather atmosphere and impression, I can recommend this course.  In and out among the pretty garden woods, outside the town, we drove.  Buildings loomed majestically out of the night; sometimes it was the tower of an unknown church, sometimes it was the house of some forgotten family that sprang suggestively to the eye, and I was grateful that I was left to suppose the indefinite type of Austrian bureau, which occupied, in all probability, the first floor.  Then we came to the river, and later, Wawel stood massed out black upon the blue, the glorious gravestone of a fallen Power.

All the stars were shining, and little red-yellow lights in the castle windows were not much bigger.  Above the whisper of the willows on its bank came the deep, quiet murmur of the Vistula, and every now and then, over the several towers of the solemn old palaces and the spires of the church where Poland has laid her kings, and so recently the king of the poets, the stars were dropping from their places, like sudden spiders, letting themselves down into the vast by faint yellow threads that showed a moment after the star itself was gone.

Later, as I looked from the open gallery of the train that was taking me away, I could not help thinking that, just a hundred years ago, Wawel’s star was shining with a light bright enough for all Europe to see; but even as the stars fell that night and left their places empty, so Wawel’s star has fallen and Poland’s star has fallen too.

ON THE ROAD TO PRAGUE[19]

BY BAYARD TAYLOR

I was pleasantly disappointed on entering Bohemia.  Instead of a dull, uninteresting country, as I expected, it is a land full of the most lovely scenery.  There is everything which can gratify the eye—­high blue mountains, valleys of the sweetest pastoral look and romantic old ruins.  The very name of Bohemia is associated with wild and wonderful legends of the rude barbaric ages.  Even the chivalric tales of the feudal times of Germany grow tame beside these earlier and darker histories.  The fallen fortresses of the Rhine or the robber-castles of the Odenwald had not for me so exciting an interest as the shapeless ruins cumbering these lonely mountains.  The civilized Saxon race was left behind; I saw around me the features and heard the language of one of those rude Slavonic tribes whose original home was on the vast steppes of Central Asia.