Thus spake the King. Furthermore, he ordained that this worshipful guild which did so much towards encouraging cleanly habits should hold as its crest or cognizance within a garland argent and azure, a kingfisher proper. Some chroniclers suggest that the bird was a parrot, but this seems unlikely--parrots can be so indiscreet. Moreover, you may see for yourself on the Old Town side of the tower of the Charles Bridge the bird within the garland, and will recognize it at once for a kingfisher. Let us watch the pageant that crosses the bridge that Charles built. They pass in the serene atmosphere which, to my thinking, enveloped the city in the Golden Age of Charles "the Father of his Country." They hurry to and fro under the lurid light of civil war waged in the name of religion; they linger on the bridge looking to the sky and its reflections in the water, under the false light which precedes disaster, or move mournfully cast down by the lowering clouds of oppression, to revive when Prague came into her own again one crisp October morning in 1918. Charles, it seems, lived in the Royal Castle a good deal. We may see him crossing the bridge he built, to look to the progress of the work he was engaged upon. Perchance he was deep in thought on high matters of State, on his Golden Bull which reaffirmed all the privileges granted to Bohemia. This Bull caused a coolness between him and the Pope, whose indefinite claims to interfere in German elections were certainly restricted by that engine. Around him the populace would be talking of the great preachers, Conrad Waldhauser and Milič of Kroměřiže, whom the King protected in their fiery onslaught on the abuses in the Church and immorality of the children of their time. Charles may have thought all this very beautiful but unlikely to last. He saw clouds arising, and they closed over Bohemia when he died.