For those who do not feel drawn towards the furtive corners of the town, there are many other opportunities of recreation. One of these was built by the city itself, and is called the Obecni Dum, which means Town House, I believe; anyway, when asking your way to it linger on the last word and pronounce it as if written "doom." This was built about the site of the palace where Wenceslaus IV held his revels, but it is informed of a more sober spirit. You come upon this building as you pass along the broad street, formerly the moat of the Old Town defences, until you arrive at the street-junction I have already mentioned. Here stands one of the most beautiful monuments to Prague's former glory, the "Powder Tower." When first you come upon this, rising serenely in all its ornate loveliness out of the roar and rattle of the traffic, the sight of it catches your breath. King Vladislav II caused it to be erected--one of the gates of the old city. An unhappy King this latter, I should say; at least his lot was cast in unhappy times. One of the last Slavs to occupy the throne of Bohemia--he was a Prince of Poland--Vladislav succeeded one of the most popular of Bohemian monarchs, George Podiebrad. The times in which Vladislav reigned were evil; the internal religious struggles of Bohemia had reached a desperate stage; all attempts to reunite the Utraquists with Rome had failed, and Alexander Borgia was Pope. The reign of this King, for all the glory of the monuments that commemorate it, seems as it were illumined by the false light that presages disaster. His son Louis was drowned while leaving the battlefield of Moháč, which reduced the greater part of Hungary to a Turkish province, and anarchy held the lands of the Bohemian Crown until in 1526 Ferdinand of Habsburg bribed his way to the throne; one noble Bohemian is said to have accepted fifty thousand gulden for his kind offices.