"Then Falsehood nudged me at my other side, thus giving me notice that I also should stretch out my hand. I begged not to be obliged to take any one lot directly without first examining it, nor to intrust myself to blind fortune. But I was told that without the permission of the Lord Regent Fate this could not be. Then stepping up to him, I modestly brought forward my request, saying that I had arrived with the intention of seeing everything for myself, and only then choosing what pleased me." "He answered: 'My son, you see that others do not this, but what is given or offered them they take. However, as you desire this, it is well!' Then he wrote on a scrap of paper, 'Speculare,' that is to say, 'Look round you or inquire,' gave it to me and left me." The pilgrim and his two companions now enter the city, and proceed first to the street of the married people. Here Komenský gives us what, for one who was married three times, and is not known to have been unhappy in marriage, seems an intensely gloomy and pessimistic view of married life. He dilates on the uncertainty of choice in marriage, on the trouble caused by children, on the disappointment felt by the childless, on all that is unlovely in love. The pilgrim then proceeds to the street of the tradesmen, and the many troubles, anxieties, and disappointments to which commerce is exposed are eloquently described. Komenský, in the later editions of the _Labyrinth_, here inserted a curious passage referring to his own sea-voyage, from which I can only quote a few lines. "The wind," he writes, "had meanwhile increased so rapidly that we were tossed about in a manner that horrified our hearts; the sea rolled round us in every direction with such gigantic waves that our course was, as it were, up high hills and down deep valleys, once upward and then again downward; sometimes we were shot upwards to such heights that it seemed as if we were to reach the moon, then again we descended as into a precipice.... This continued day and night, and any one can imagine what anguish and fear we felt. Then I said to myself, 'Surely these men (the sailors) must be more pious than all other men, they who never for an hour are sure of their lives;' but looking at them, I observed that they were all without exception eating gluttonously, as in a tavern, drinking, playing, laughing, talking in an obscene manner, in fact, committing every sort of evil deed and licentiousness." The pilgrim next visits the scholars or learned men. Komenský, here quite in his element, passes judgment on many _savants_ of his time, and gives his opinion on astronomy, history, natural history, poetry, and philosophy as they appeared to him in the writings of his contemporaries. His erudition, judged, of course, by the standard of his time, does not appear profound, but he sometimes, in few words, describes epigrammatically currents of thought that had importance in his day.