The first step taken towards an outward display of regained power was the destruction by the Jesuits of that old church which stood on the Malá Stranské Naměsti, in which, as I told you, the martyrs of 1621 partook of the Sacraments on their road to execution. The Church of St. Nicholas then reared its stately pile out of the medley of quaint old roofs and dormer windows immediately below my terrace. There were changes going on among those sleepy houses too, for the victory of the White Mountain and the Imperialist successes in the Thirty Years' War had brought to Bohemia a swarm of foreign adventurers, officers in the Emperor's armies, who acquired the property of exiled Bohemian nobility and set about building palaces for themselves. They are interesting too, these palaces in Prague, and some of them have beautiful gardens, as those of Fürstenberg, Lobkovitz, Schoenborn and Waldstein. The latter palace has, indeed, more than ordinary interest on account of the strange man who built it. Albrecht of Waldstein was a Bohemian noble of no very high degree, and belonged to a Protestant family. He seems to have had no great learning, but turned when he arrived at man's estate to the dark sciences, more especially astronomy, and from the study of this science he hoped to look behind the veil of the future and read his fortunes in the stars. He rose, no doubt on account of his ability, to high command, to a position of more real power than that of his imperial master. He amassed a vast fortune, and built himself a huge palace in Prague--from my terrace I could point to you its long line of roofs. To build his palace a number of smaller houses had to be pulled down, some twenty-three in all. Then Giovanni Marini, with his Italian and Dutch architects and landscape gardeners, set to work and built up this regal abode of gigantic proportions, a place as vast as Waldstein's ambition and dreams of power and conquest. For all he was of Protestant faith originally, Waldstein had as patron saint St. Wenceslaus, to whom he built a beautiful chapel in his palace. There are gardens and fountains, a Sala terrena, said to be the largest in Europe; there are magnolia-trees as old as the palace; there is a bower of black old yew-trees screening the space where this warrior-statesman received the ambassadors of kings who sought alliance with him. There is an uncanny air of desolation over all this vast demesne, an air of unsatisfied ambition, of vain striving and infinite sadness of remorse. I can picture to myself Waldstein pacing along that alley of clipped trees, now overgrown, scheming and planning. I am sure he was one of those whose vision showed to them the endless possibilities of power wielded from Prague as capital of a great Central European State, that he was of one mind with George Podiebrad, Charles IV, Přemysl Ottokar II, Libuša, and I will even include that Frankish adventurer, Samo. But Waldstein had to reckon with a