I have done speaking.  Otherwise, they shall be taken immediately into the street again!” Thus in every hall he rapped and scolded, driving the women to one side with his stick and the men to the other, till we were nearly through, when the thought of the coming fee made him a little more polite.  He had a regular set of descriptions by heart, which he went through with a great flourish, pointing particularly to the common military caps of the late Emperors of Prussia and Austria, as “treasures beyond all price to the nation!” Whereupon, the crowd of common people gazed reverently on the shabby beavers, and I verily believe, would have devoutly kissed them, had the glass covering been removed.  I happened to be next to a tall, dignified young man, who looked on all this with a displeasure almost amounting to contempt.  Seeing I was a foreigner, he spoke, in a low tone, bitterly of the Austrian government.  “You are not then an Austrian?” I asked.  “No, thank God!” was the reply:  “but I have seen enough of Austrian tyranny.  I am a Pole!”

The first wing contains banners used in the French Revolution, and liberty trees with the red cap; the armor of Rudolph of Hapsburg, Maximilian I., the Emperor Charles V., and the hat, sword and order of Marshal Schwarzenberg.  Some of the halls represent a fortification, with walls, ditches and embankments, made of muskets and swords.  A long room in the second wing contains an encampment, in which twelve or fifteen large tents are formed in like manner.  Along the sides are grouped old Austrian banners, standards taken from the French, and horsetails and flags captured from the Turks.  “They make a great boast,” said the Pole, “of a half dozen French colors, but let them go to the Hospital des Invalides, in Paris, and they will find hundreds of the best banners of Austria!” They also exhibited the armor of a dwarf king of Bohemia and Hungary, who died, a gray-headed old man, in his twentieth year; the sword of Marlborough; the coat of Gustavus Adolphus, pierced in the breast and back with the bullet which killed him at Lutzen; the armor of the old Bohemian princess Libussa, and that of the amazon Wlaska, with a steel visor made to fit the features of her face.  The last wing was the most remarkable.  Here we saw the helm and breastplate of Attila, king of the Huns, which once glanced at the head of his myriads of wild hordes, before the walls of Rome; the armor of Count Stahremberg, who commanded Vienna during the Turkish siege in 1529, and the holy banner of Mahomet, taken at that time from the Grand Vizier, together with the steel harness of John Sobieski of Poland, who rescued Vienna from the Turkish troops under Kara Mustapha; the hat, sword and breastplate of Godfrey of Bouillon, the Crusader-king of Jerusalem, with the banners of the cross the Crusaders had borne to Palestine, and the standard they captured from the Turks on the walls of the Holy City!  I felt all my boyish enthusiasm for the romantic age of the Crusaders