One of the most interesting objects in Vienna is the imperial armory.  We were admitted through tickets previously procured from the armory direction; as there was already one large company within, we were told to wait in the court till our turn came.  Around the wall, on the inside, is suspended the enormous chain which the Turks stretched across the Danube at Buda in the year 1529 to obstruct the navigation.  It has eight thousand links and is nearly a mile in length.  The court is filled with cannon of all shapes and sizes, many of which were conquered from other nations.  I saw a great many which were cast during the French Revolution, with the words “Liberte!  Egalite!” upon them, and a number of others bearing the simple letter “N."....

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.  There was 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 Luetzen, the armor of the old Bohemian princess Libussa, and that of the amazon Wlaska, with a steel vizor 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 Mohammed, 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 revive as I looked on the torn and moldering banners which once waved on the hills of Judea, or perhaps followed the sword of the Lion-Heart through the fight on the field of Ascalon.  What tales could they not tell, those old standards cut and shivered by spear and lance!  What brave hands have carried them through the storm of battle, what dying eyes have looked upward to the cross on the folds as the last prayer was breathed for the rescue of the holy sepulcher.

[Footnote A:  From “Views Afoot.”  Published by G.P.  Putnam’s Sons.]

[Footnote B:  The population of Vienna, according to the census of 1910, was 2,085,888.]