The prestige of the various colleges and the reputation of the men who taught there had drawn to Krakow not only genuine students but also many of the craft that live by their wits in all societies, in all ages—fortune tellers and astrologers, magicians and palmists, charlatans, necromancers, and fly-by-nights who were forever eluding the authorities of the law. Here somewhere on the Street of the Pigeons they all found lodging. In the rooms above the street, in the kitchens beneath the street, these men plied their trades. Self-termed astrologers read in the stars the destinies of the gullible; they foretold happiness to trusting peasant girls who came to them for advice in their love matters, they prophesied disaster to merchants who, held by fear, might be induced to part with much money; they cheated, they robbed, and often on provocation they killed, until after many years they gave the street a certain unsavory reputation. Against the machinations of these men the influence of the university was ever working, and the first great blow that many of these magic crafts and black arts received was struck by Nicholas Kopernik, better known as Copernicus, many years later when Joseph Charnetski was a very old man; Copernicus, working with rough implements, even before the telescope had been invented, proved to men for the first time that the heavenly bodies, stars and planets, move in the skies according to well-fixed and definitely determined laws, subject only to the will of the Creator of the universe, and that they have nothing to do with the destinies of individuals. All about them in the street flitted men dressed in long robes like that of the guardian of the little girl, though all the robes were not alike. Some were clerical with closed front and collar, others were open and flowing with great sleeves like a bishop’s gown, some were of blue, some were of red, some were of green. Joseph noticed one robe of ermine over which was worn a chain of heavy gold, at the end of which hung suspended a great amethyst cross. They passed a house, part wood and part stone, where were gathered at opened doors a great group of young men in plain black robes, much less sumptuous than some others which they had seen, all the members of the group engaged in a lively altercation, as the guardian informed the boy and girl, concerning the movement of the stars. One was contending that the firmament of stars moved for one hundred years to the west—another (and this was backed by a written argument from the old Alphonsian tables from Spain) that the stars moved constantly in one direction without change.