In St. Thomas's there is also a painting ascribed to Rubens over the altar. It looks doubtful to me, but the light was bad, and I could form no opinion as to the picture's merit. Another painting in this church gave me a thrill, a Virgin and Child, both black! I hoped that at last I had discovered a picture I had heard so much of, "The Black Madonna"--a famous picture with a stirring history. There are said to have been several "Black Madonnas" in Bohemia at one time, and that of Stara Boleslav was the most precious of them. St. Ludmilla herself had given this picture to her pious grandson Wenceslaus, who, as we know, was murdered at Stara Boleslav. Podiwin, the most trusty henchman of Wenceslaus, buried this treasure when his master was murdered. You could not well let it fall into the hands of Brother Boleslav, the hefty heathen; he would have been incapable of appreciating the beautiful legend of how the young mother, filled with anxiety on the flight into Egypt, prayed that she and her Child might be turned black while their exile lasted. The picture was found again in 1160 by a ploughman; the Saxons, on their raid into Bohemia in 1635, stole it, and Ferdinand II redeemed it and brought it back to Prague. It should be somewhere in this city. I will leave the search for it to you, when you pay your visit to Prague, which is surely inevitable now that you have read so far in this book. A tall, very thin spire, that peers up near the mass of the Nicholas Church, reminds me of others of British race, who had their day in Prague and, I feel sure, contributed to its reputation for religion and piety. These were the _Englische Fräulein_, as the German chronicler calls them; this means English virgins or maidens--you cannot very well call them English misses--whose Order, founded by Clara Ward in the seventeenth century, was introduced into Prague in the eighteenth by a Princess Auersberg. I am not sure how these ladies passed their time, nor what their object was in life, but no doubt they maintained that state to which they considered themselves called, and this alone should be accounted unto them for righteousness in a gay town like Prague.