ing about;--and otherwise great emptiness and silence. The shiny
Hotels (shine due to paint mainly) offer little of humanly edible; and,
in the interior, smells strike you as--as the OLDEST you have ever met
before. A people not given to washing, to ventilating! Many gospels have
been preached in those parts, aud abstruse Orthodoxies, sometimes with
fire and sword, and no end of emphasis; but that of Soap-and-Water
(which surely is as Catholic as any, and the plainest of all) has not
yet got introduced there!" [Tourist's Note (13th September, 1858).]

Czaslau hangs upon the English mind (were not the ignorance so total) by
another tie: it is the resting-place of Zisca, whose drum, or the fable
of whose drum, we saw in the citadel of Glatz. Zisca was buried IN his
skin, at Czaslau finally: in the Church of St. Peter and St. Paul there;
with due epitaph; and his big mace or battle-club, mostly iron, hung
honorable on the wall close by. Kaiser Ferdinand, Karl V.'s brother, on
a Progress to Prag, came to lodge at Czaslau, one afternoon: "What is
that?" said the Kaiser, strolling over this Peter-and-Paul's Church, and
noticing the mace. "Ugh! Faugh!" growled he angrily, on hearing what;
and would not lodge in the Town, but harnessed again, and drove farther
that same night. The club is now gone; but Zisca's dust lies there
irremovable till Doomsday, in the land where his limbs were made. A
great behemoth of a war-captain; one of the fiercest, inflexiblest,
ruggedest creatures ever made in the form of man. Devoured Priests, with
appetite, wherever discoverable: Dishonorers of his Sister; murderers of
the God's-witness John Huss; them may all the Devils help! Beat Kaiser
Sigismund SUPRA-GRAMMATICAM again and ever again, scattering the Kitter
hosts in an extraordinary manner;--a Zisca conquerable only by Death,
and the Pest-Fever passing that way.

His birthplace, Troznow, is a village in the Budweis neighborhood, 100
miles to south. There, for three centuries after him, stood "Zisca's
Oak" (under shade of which, his mother, taken suddenly on the
harvest-field, had borne Zisca): a weird object, gate of Heaven and
of Orcus to the superstitious populations about. At midnight on the
Hallow-Eve, dark smiths would repair thither, to cut a twig of the Zisca
Oak: twig of it put, at the right moment, under your stithy, insures
good luck, lends pith to arm and heart, which is already good luck. So
that a Bishop of those parts, being of