The block of buildings including the tall Church of St. Nicholas, which fills up the middle of that irregular place, the Mala Stranské Naměsti, or Place of the Small Side, would be new to Vladislav were he to repeat his progress to-day. There was a church--a very old one--on this spot, dating back to the thirteenth century; it is said that the martyrs of 1621 communicated here _in utraque_ on the morning of their execution. The tall, imposing Church of St. Nicholas replaced the older edifice--a typical monument this of Jesuit pride of conquest over the fallen National Church of Bohemia. Seen from my terrace, the copper dome of St. Nicholas, its tall and slender campanile, stand up dominant over sleepy red-tiled roofs where linger memories of much earlier days. It is indeed a splendid building, this master-work of Ignatius and Kilian Dienzenhoffer. I must admit this, little as I admire _baroque_ and for all my loathing of the spirit of triumphant intolerance and bigotry which informed the builders of this great monument to the enslavement of a nation's soul. In former years, before the war, there stood here in the narrowest part of this place, a monument to another triumph over Bohemia's freedom, a monument to Field-Marshal Radecky, whose figure was supported by types of Austrian soldiery of his time. This monument has been removed--destroyed, I believe, by the Pragers when they regained their freedom in October 1918. The removal of this monument leaves a blank, not a sentimental one, merely an artistic one, and has led to an unexpected and probably undesired effect. It has given undue prominence to a little building that stands some way up the place, a building of strict utility with no pretensions to architectural consideration, a building which now stands out exposed as it were, trying to hide its confusion under a mask of gaudy advertisement posters. The singularly characteristic houses on the north side of this square, with their deep arcades, were probably rebuilt or renovated in the seventeenth century; they must be of considerable antiquity, for one of them, a corner house called "Montagu," has its place in history. The name, by the way, is not derived from the Italian, but from the simple German _Montag_, Monday; and it has by way of embellishment a Slavonic suffix. It was in this Montagu House that the discontented members of the Bohemian Estates were wont to meet in 1618, and here they hit upon the bright idea of throwing the two lieutenants, go-betweens or whatever they were, of their Habsburg ruler, out of a window. So here on this Mala Stranské Naměsti you may see the very spot from which the War of Thirty Years started.