nd 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 Fuerstenberg, 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 Ge