By a strange coincidence, on the very day that the last postcard came to Jozef in Slovakia, another reached him from his friend, Jaroslav. It was dated from the famous watering place, Carlsbad, in northern Bohemia, where Jaroslav had accompanied his father, who had some business there.
"The Germans here, who have largely control of things," it stated, "are angry at the turn affairs have taken. They clamor about the rights of the minority, they who never considered the rights of the Slavic majority. But I think they are calming down, for they see that they're going to get justice. The Czechs are not revengeful. If we treated them as they treated us—whew!" He said no more of the Germans, but humorously described some of the patients he had seen; some very fat, some very thin, all expecting cure from digestive disturbances.
A few days before he left, Jozef's godfather took one more walk across the sixteen-arched statue decorated Charles Bridge (Karluv most), through the picturesque Little Side, with its quaint old-time palaces of nobles, up a steep and winding street to the Hradcany, as the group of buildings around the royal palace together with it, is called.
From these heights, Praha is seen in all its wondrous beauty lying on both sides of the River Vltava (Moldau). It seems an endless succession of parks, gardens, queer roofs that are the delight of every artist that sees them, and innumerable towers and steeples. Across the river he could see the rocky Vysehrad, the seat of the early rulers. It was there that Libusa, the reputed founder of Praha, made her famous prophecy: "Lo, before me I see a city whose glory reaches to the skies!"
He mused at the great richness not only in Bohemia's real historic past but in her legendary lore; how everything about the city has its story. On the hills towards which he was turned, Vlasta, the leader of an Amazon band, made her stand in the early days against Prince Premysl; near him was the tower of Daliborka, where a noble was once imprisoned and said to have found solace in a violin. Since then ghostly music is said to haunt the place. Of the alchemists who lived near by in the Street of Gold, a street of the tiniest, most brightly-hued houses imaginable, he recalled the strange tales told. In the very courts of the palace, legends mingled with history.
A peculiar feeling that he had never experienced before came over him. To live in Praha, he felt, was not the prosaic, everyday life he had always known; it was living a brightly colored romance too disturbing for him to get used to now. His own dear Slovakia, with its quiet, simple life, was better for him.
The next day the new President arrived from abroad, and was installed in office. That was the greatest day of all in Praha. The feeling of the multitude was expressed by one old man who said, "I shall weep no more for my dead, since they helped make the fairy tale come true that brutal force no longer rules, that a proud, deserving nation is freed at last from a bondage to which so long the world was indifferent."
THE END