A word of warning here: never try to be enterprising between midday and 2 p.m. in Prague, or for that matter anywhere else in the country, unless it be in search of food. At midday everything closes down--churches, museums, shops; they do not open again till the good people in charge of them have had sufficient time for an ample meal--two hours are considered sufficient. You will therefore find the cathedral closed to you until the vergers have dined. But in the meantime you will find the quaint conglomeration of buildings at the east end of the cathedral very attractive. These buildings originally served many purposes--cathedral close, market and custom house, and even at times as bear-garden or zoo. To my thinking, the outside of the cathedral is far more attractive than the inside, which suffers from over-decoration in the incongruous style peculiar to Continental churches. I shall not conduct you personally round the Church of Our Lady of Tyn. Good King Wenceslaus, of whom we sing at Christmas-time, seems to have caused the chapel and tower of the Town Hall to be built, at least according to archæologists; the sign of a kingfisher within a wreath which appears here is taken to denote work done in his time. The master architect of those last decades of the fourteenth century was Peter Parler, who also did a good deal of work on the Tyn Church. [Illustration: A CORNER OF THE OLD TOWN.] The tower was added to the house of Welflin od Kamene, which was acquired in 1538, and some fifty years later the beautiful chapel, the Gothic projection of which looks out on to the scene of martyrdom of 1621. You will find two very interesting and lovely Sessions Rooms in this Town Hall. In one of these George Podiebrad, a native of Bohemia and of the country's faith, was elected and proclaimed King in 1458. To my thinking, the best time of day on which to come upon this old Town Hall is of an evening, say in late autumn; approach it by that quaint little alley, the Melantrichova, called so in honour of Melantrich, who was famous as printer and publisher in the latter half of the sixteenth century. While wandering about the narrow alleys, these quaint passages under the houses, a peculiar feature of Prague, you will pick up something of the old spirit of the city and repeople it with the shades of former inhabitants or visitors to suit your taste or knowledge of its history. There is, for instance, one visitor whom I can quite see roaming about in nocturnal Prague--Dr. Faust. Local legend prefers to call him Wilhelm instead of Heinrich, but that does not matter--he fits into the picture.