When, many years ago now, the once potent and extensive kingdom of Bohemia gradually dissolved and passed away, not a few historians were found to chronicle its past glories; and some have gone on to tell the fate of this or that once powerful chieftain who either donned the swallow-tail and conformed or, proudly self-exiled, sought some quiet retreat and died as he had lived, a Bohemian. But these were of the princes of the land. To the people, the villeins, the common rank and file, does no interest attach? Did they waste and pine, anæmic, in thin, strange, unwonted air? Or sit at the table of the scornful and learn, with Dante, how salt was alien bread? It is of one of those faithful commons I would speak, narrating only “the short and simple annals of the poor.” It is to be noted that the kingdom aforesaid was not so much a kingdom as a United States—a collection of self-ruling guilds, municipalities, or republics, bound together by a common method of viewing life. “There _once_ was a king of Bohemia”—but that was a long time ago, and even Corporal Trim was not certain in whose reign it was. These small free States, then, broke up gradually, from various causes and with varying speed; and I think ours was one of the last to go. With us, as with many others, it was a case of lost leaders. “Just for a handful of silver he left us”; though it was not exactly that, but rather that, having got the handful of silver, they wanted a wider horizon to fling it about under than Bloomsbury afforded. So they left us for their pleasure; and in due time, one by one— But I will not be morose about them; they had honestly earned their success, and we all honestly rejoiced at it, and do so still. When old Pan was dead and Apollo’s bow broken, there were many faithful pagans who would worship at no new shrines, but went out to the hills and caves, truer to the old gods in their discrowned desolation than in their pomp and power. Even so were we left behind, a remnant of the faithful. We had never expected to become great in art or song; it was the life itself that we loved; that was our end—not, as with them, the means to an end. We aimed at no glory, no lovers of glory we; Give us the glory of going on and still to be. Unfortunately, going on was no longer possible; the old order had changed, and we could only patch up our broken lives as best might be.