no better than a tavern signboard. He is represented broad-shouldered, oval-faced like the rest of his Czech compatriots, with a lofty forehead, and one fierce, cruel eye. His hair is thick, black and curling. This terrible man laid his country waste with fire and sword for eighteen years, under the pretext of a war for religion. The Hussites called themselves Calixtines, as fighting to obtain a right to the chalice. The redoubtable Zizka wi' the Flail was no better than a sanguinary brigand; and his army was composed of all the ruffians who delighted in wars that would join his standard of the golden chalice, to kill, mutilate, and torture their brethren, rob churches and plunder houses.
In the same Museum that contains the portrait of Zizka is a collection of Hussite weapons, notably of the redoubted flails wielded by his men, poles 6 ft. in length attached to which at top by leather thongs or iron staples is the swinging-arm, braced with iron bands and bristling with spikes to smash a skull and tear to pieces a face against which it is wielded. There is as well in the Museum a portrait of Huss, a heavy, sulky-faced man.
Tabor itself occupies a rocky height surrounded on three sides by a loop of the River Lusnitza, the fourth side Zizka fortified with a double wall and towers. Zizka figures very largely in the legends of the Bohemians. He was born under a tree, and the spot is regarded as permanently blighted; so also is the place where stood his tent in which he breathed his last.
In driving through a part of Bohemia from Vienna to Dresden we had occasionally long stages, and in the twilight often saw, what at the time amazed and not a little startled me, long rows of hemp stacks like a procession of giantesses stalking over the plain. In 1886 I was in Bohemia again, and had an opportunity of sketching some of them.
When the hemp has been harvested, it is dried, and then soaked for a fortnight or three weeks in stagnant and evil-smelling water; the next process is exposure to the sun, in order that its outer bark may rot and fall off. When in this condition the women go into the filthy ponds, where they may be seen by the dozen, standing, almost up to, in some cases entirely up to their middles, anyhow much above their knees, in the black and fetid mud, handing out the decayed hemp to others on the bank. After this stinking mass has been dried in the sun, the hemp is next
