344 THE STOKY OF MY LIFE [1853
others, in the mossy stone. Forest and bilberries again to the hotel on the Greater Winterberg, where we dined on mountain florellen and strawberries and cranberries. Forest, ever the same, to the Prebischthor, a natural arch projecting over an abyss, splendid in light and shadow, and altogether the finest scene in the Saxon Switzerland . . . then a descent to Schona. We found it easy to accomplish in a day and a half that for which Murray allots four days."
"Prague, July 17. All through the night we travelled in a railway carriage with twenty-two windows and eighty inmates. Dawn broke on a flat country near the Moldau. At last a line of white wall crowned a distant hill. Then, while an Austrian official was collecting passports, railway and river alike made a turn, and a chain of towers, domes, and minarets appeared above the waving cornfields, one larger than the others — the citadel of Prague!
" What a poem the town is! — the old square of the Grosse Ring, where the beautiful delicately-sculptured Rathhaus and church look down upon a red marble fountain, ever surrounded by women with pitchers, in tall white caps: the streets of Bohemian palaces, with gigantic stone figures guarding the doors : the bridge, with statues of saints bending inwards from every pier, and the huge Hradschin palace on the hill beyond, with the cathedral in its midst: the gloomy precipice from which the Amazonian Queen Libessa hurled down her lovers one by one as she got tired of them: the glorious view from the terrace of the Hradschin, recalling pictures of the view from the Pincio at Rome: the wonderful tombs of the Bohemian kings, and the silver chandeliers and red lights before the shrine of St. John Nepomuck in the cathedral."
" July 18. On Sunday afternoon we were at the Jewish synagogue, the oldest building here—older than Pragueomen gathering faggots with bare arms and legs, till we- reached the Jagd-Haus on the promontory of the Lesser Winterberg, where Schiller's name is cut, withnd In* devoted to the t^Ueen, and kiss a Testament upon it. Then the Viet»-(*haneellor says, 4 Now attend dili^<*ntly," ami ntukes a little «j»et*e!i inyi»ii ran try/' ami lir toi»k Hun* mi IIIH l»ark and llr\v off ami off till hr nuw t«» Ual»vli»iu wlu*n« In.* si^t .»\i'.»J •js'tnu i ^Aiud sn 'j.>rj , unin:ji.\?n ,»t|i «»j ^snn.nii jp; ,V«j ,*!