y new and fresh
impressions of the place, and can cherish no vague memories, encouraged
by an album at home, in which the nameless cathedrals of many countries
confuse themselves, and only the Coliseum at Rome stands forth, not to
be contradicted or misnamed.

But it became necessary to put a period to my wandering, unless I wished
to find myself stranded in Vienna with "neither cross nor pile." The
references to money-matters have been designedly slight throughout these
pages. It is not my habit to keep accounts. I have never found that
you get any money back by knowing just how you have spent it, and a
conscience-pricking record of expenses is very ungrateful reading. So,
when a certain beautiful evening came, I felt that I had to look upon it
as my last. Being too early for the train, I bid the man drive about in
the early summer dark for three-quarters of an hour.

To such as do not care for precise information and statistics in foreign
places, but appreciate rather atmosphere and impression, I can recommend
this course. In and out among the pretty garden woods, outside the town,
we drove. Buildings loomed majestically out of the night; sometimes it
was the tower of an unknown church, sometimes it was the house of some
forgotten family that sprang suggestively to the eye, and I was grateful
that I was left to suppose the indefinite type of Austrian bureau, which
occupied, in all probability, the first floor. Then we came to the
river, and later, Wawel stood massed out black upon the blue, the
glorious gravestone of a fallen Power.

All the stars were shining, and little red-yellow lights in the castle
windows were not much bigger. Above the whisper of the willows on its
bank came the deep, quiet murmur of the Vistula, and every now and then,
over the several towers of the solemn old palaces and the spires of the
church where Poland has laid her kings, and so recently the king of the
poets, the stars were dropping from their places, like sudden spiders,
letting themselves down into the vast by faint yellow threads that
showed a moment after the star itself was gone.

Later, as I looked from the open gallery of the train that was taking me
away, I could not help thinking that, just a hundred years ago, Wawel's
star was shining with a light bright enough for all Europe to see;
but even as the stars fell that night and left their places empty, so
Wawel's star has fallen and Poland's star has fallen too.

ON THE R