The town hall is a wonderful building with Gothic towers and much carving.
It was in front of the town hall that, after conquering Bohemia at the battle of the White Mountain 500 years ago, the Austrian conqueror had all the aristocracy and all the learned men of Bohemia executed publicly, cutting out their eyes and tongues, cutting off their hands and feet and then beheading them as a symbol of the conquest of Bohemia and expecting by this to destroy the Bohemian national spirit.
The executions lasted all day and at night there was no one left in all Bohemia who could lead the people in a revolt against their enemies.
At the front of the town hall and a massive part of it is a clock made by a blind man in the Sixteenth Century. At a quarter before each hour the two little doors above open, the cock on the roof crows and the 12 apostles pass behind the open doors, each one stopping, turning to look at you and bowing.
The cock crows again three times when Peter passes and Judas comes last with a money bag and a rope. Meantime the clock strikes and the skeleton death at the right of the clock beats a slow roll on a drum. The clock tells the year, month, week and day, also position of the planets and sun.
Now We Visit Bohemia (2)
September 20, 1920
“Prague is the city of my heart,” writes Rose Wilder Lane. “I arrived at noon and found the Sokol fete (a festival of celebration) in full blast. The streets were masses of flags and fully half of them were American. Bands played on every corner and the streets were glorious with color, everyone wearing the Bohemian costumes which are the loveliest things in the world— embedded trousers and jackets and feathered caps on the men; the women wearing very full, short skirts, red and yellow and green, all gorgeous colors, and white waists solidly embroidered in colors with enormous sleeves. With this dress they wore aprons, of lace and silk, and short, black, velvet jackets. They wore head-dresses of jewels and embroidery, or enormous ones of white stuff with 3-foot stiff white bows behind.” These are the old national costumes and must be stunning in more ways than one, but the description is not intended as fashion suggestions.
Rose Wilder Lane took tea with President Masaryk in the old castle on the hill. She also went into the tenements of the city such as those of the “East Side” in New York and of them she says, “We climbed up five flights of smelly stairs passing windows overlooking a courtyard where the rotting balconies were falling from the walls and garbage and sewage dripped and chickens and goats added to the scents. And all the women in sight were sitting on their doorsteps reading. Bohemia is the most literate country in the world. Everyone reads and reads good books.
“I only wish you could get an idea of Prague from the poor postcards I sent you. It is beyond words beautiful. Even the sidewalks—every single sidewalk in the city—are of mosaic and as you walk you see how the man who laid them played along as he went, making now a pattern of circles, getting tired of that and amusing himself by making a large and beautiful butterfly, going back to a new combination of circles, stopped to try a landscape that didn’t succeed very well and putting in plain gray stones for awhile until his courage rose again and he tried the landscape once more with a larger assortment of colored stones and succeeded so nobly that in his joy he did zigzag lightning lines for quite a distance.
“There are old houses painted—the whole fronts painted—with marvelously colored pictures sometime in the fourteenth century, all the colors still bright and beautiful.
“On the hill are the enormous stone walls, with hundreds of people living in the rooms inside them, that were built by the good Queen Libussa in six hundred something, when she began the city of Prague.
“And oh, if you could see the Street of the Alchemists, the little street that is part of the great, old castle on the hill, the castle running along both sides of a deep, wooded canyon where the wild beasts were kept that ate prisoners thrown from the dungeons above.
“The Street of Alchemists looks as if it had been built by gnomes; its houses are so little and so quaint and so curiously colored. They make, of course, one long wall, but each is a little back or forward from the next, and all the roofs, that are hardly higher than your head, are slanted at a different angle or gabled or ornamented with a leering face. Inside there are only two rooms in each, the tiniest of little rooms where each alchemist worked at his experiments, and another just large enough for a tiny couch and a shrine, with a deep, small window overlooking the canyon and, in the days of the alchemists, the waiting wild beasts. The alchemists were maintained and the street for them built by King Rudolph, the last of the Bohemian monarchs when Bohemia was free and kings elected by the people. He was a patron of the arts and sciences, and greatly desired to be the king who should be honored by the discovery of the method of turning other metals to gold; the alchemists were honored and fatly fed, and expected to produce the secret. In time the king’s patience wore thin and he earnestly desired them to produce it pretty quick, whereupon in despair some of them melted gold coins in their crucibles, and this was made known to the rejoicing king, and the alchemists fled wildly in the night, scattering all their belongings down the steep, highwalled road to the town below, and some got away and some were speared by guards, and some were haled back and thrown from their windows to the beasts, and that was the end of the street of the alchemists, which is now inhabited by watchmen of the palace. And the place of the wild beasts is inhabited by four Siberian bears that the Czechs in Russia brought back as gifts to President Masaryk who now occupies the palace.”
The Farm Home (29)
October 5, 1920
Missourians again have cause to be proud of their state and their governor, for in the business of state government an example has been set which should be followed by the other states, and even by the United States Government at Washington.
When there is so much talk of extravagance and mismanagement, both public and private, it is very encouraging to know that our present state government has been so well managed that there is to be a lessening of the taxes because the state does not need so much income. On May 2 the balance in the state treasury was $11,006,898.94 and there were no outstanding debts.
There never before has been so much state money in the treasury. The revenue fund, from which the expenses of the state government are paid, has a balance to its credit of $2,150,666.13. The school fund has $2,510,168.59 of good money on hand, while the fund for good roads has a balance of $3,470,659.50.
This money has not been saved from the state revenues by letting any of the state institutions suffer in their necessary expenses, but instead by putting them on a business basis. As an example, under the present system of management the earnings of the state penitentiary during April were $439,698.99 and the expenses were $143,764.42.
Interest on the balance in the treasury is now bringing to the state $1,000 a day, which goes into the general revenue fund. As this is the fund that is used for the running expenses of the state government, the amount that must be collected by taxes is lessened by just that $1,000 a day.
The budget system, bringing expenses within the income with a margin over for savings, is quite as good for private use. It helps amazingly to keep down expenses as I know from experience. We all try to save and would be inclined to resent it if anyone should say we were not careful in our spending, but we are too much like the town woman who boycotted eggs because they were too high and then, without a protest, paid $36 for a pair of low shoes. Unless we figure carefully on both income and expenses, it is so easy to throw away with one hand what we save with the other.
The other day I sent to town for a toilet preparation, the price of which has always been 50 cents. When the Man of the Place brought it home, he said the price was $1 and the reason was plain when I had examined the goods. They were done up in a new style and very fancy package.
Now, it was the preparation I needed, not a fancy package, but that sporty container had doubled the price.
Everyone these days has
a try at telling what is wrong with business conditions. I am sure that one thing causing us a great deal of trouble and making much higher the high cost of living is the extra price we pay for fancy packages.
The Farm Home (30)
October 20, 1920
There is a purple haze over the hill tops and a hint of sadness in the sunshine, because of summer’s departure; on the low ground down by the spring the walnuts are dropping from the trees and squirrels are busy hiding away their winter supply. Here and there the leaves are beginning to change color and a little, vagrant, autumn breeze goes wandering over the hills and down the valleys whispering to “follow, follow,” until it is almost impossible to resist. So I should not be too harshly criticized if I ramble a little even in my conversation.
We have been gathering the fruits of the season’s work into barns and bins and cellars. The harvest has been abundant and a good supply is stored away for future needs.
Now I am wondering what sort of fruits, and how plentiful the supply, we have stored away in our hearts and souls and minds from our year’s activities. The time of gathering together the visible results of our year’s labor is a very appropriate time to reckon up the invisible, more important harvest.
When we lived in South Dakota, where the cold came early and strong, we once had a hired man (farmers had them in those days), who was a good worker, but whose money was too easily spent. In the fall when the first cold wind struck him, he would shiver and chatter and always he would say, “Gee Mighty! This makes a feller wonder what’s become of his summer’s wages!”
Ever since then, Harvest Home time has seemed to me the time to gather together and take stock of our mental and spiritual harvest, and to wonder what we have done with the wealth of opportunity that has come to us and the treasures we have had in our keeping. Much too often I have felt like quoting the hired man of other days.
Have we found a new friendship worth while? Have we even kept safely the old friendships, treasures worth much more than silver and gold? People in these history-making days hold their opinions so strongly and defend them so fiercely, that a strain will be put upon many friendships, and the pity of it is that these misunderstandings will come between people who are earnestly striving for the right thing. Right seems to be obscured and truth is difficult to find.
But if the difficulty of finding the truth has increased our appreciation of its value, if the beauty of truth is plainer to us and more desired, then we have gathered treasure for the future.
We lay away the gleanings of our years in the edifice of our character, where nothing is ever lost. What have we stored away, in this safe place during the season that is past? Is it something that will keep sound and pure and sweet or something that is faulty and not worth storing?
As a child I learned my Bible lessons by heart, in the good old-fashioned way, and once won the prize for repeating correctly more verses from the Bible than any other person in the Sunday school. But always my mind had a trick of picking a text here and a text there and connecting them together in meaning. In this way there came to me a thought that makes the stores from my invisible harvest important to me. These texts are familiar to everyone. It is their sequence that gives the thought.
“Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break thru and steal. But lay up for yourselves treasures in Heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break thru nor steal.”3
And then: “Why say ye, Lo here and lo there. Know ye not that the kingdom of Heaven is within you?”4
The Farm Home (31)
November 5, 1920
It is a rather general idea that the housewife’s duties are narrowing to the mind, because of their samenesses—their “over and overishness” as one writer puts it.
If this is true it is not necessary, for there are many windows that open wide so we may pass thru them mentally, out into paths that lead on and on to far journeyings and interesting knowledge.
It doesn’t occupy our brains to peel potatoes, to sweep and make beds or to darn the family hose. Our bodies learn to do the everyday tasks without much head-work, leaving our minds free to pass thru these windows and follow the fascinating ways that lead from them. The lightest touch of a thought is enough to set them wide that we may escape from any narrowing round of everyday work.
Thru my kitchen window, I saw the puppies playing and was reminded of an article I had read on training dogs for circus work. This brought to my mind the greatest circus man, our own P. T. Barnum, and that he once nearly bought the house where Shakespeare was born, to bring to America as an attraction. And that evening, with the help of magazines, I wandered thru the country where Shakespeare lived and worked and where the scenes of his plays and poems are laid.
Warwickshire, “Shakespeare’s country,” lies nearly in the heart of England and while there have been many changes, still a great deal is now as it was when Shakespeare saw it 300 years ago. The river Avon still flows gently thru the sweet meadows and leafy forests, spanned by its stone bridges which have been in use for hundreds of years. And on its banks are still many of the massive and wonderful old buildings of Shakespeare’s time.
The Forest of Arden has disappeared and, where the poet’s characters wandered among the trees in “As You Like It,” there are now villages, farms, fine country houses and large parks.
Kenilworth Castle that Shakespeare saw in all its glory as a stately palace and at the same time a strong fortress, is now a mass of ruins. One of the parts still intact is Caesar’s Tower, which still dominates the country around as it has for more than 400 years, its massive walls of stone 15 and 16 feet thick defying the march of the centuries. Kenilworth Castle was the scene of Sir Walter Scott’s story “Kenilworth.”
Warwick Castle was the same in Shakespeare’s time as it is today; a castle fortress of medieval times whose stone towers and battlements and massive buttresses and windows high in the great walls bring to our minds pictures of ancient times and life.
Stratford-Upon-Avon is in the southern part of Warwickshire and here is the house where Shakespeare was born in 1564. It is now national property, having been bought by the British government in 1847, because of P. T. Barnum’s proposition to buy it and remove it to America.
One mile from Stratford-Upon-Avon is the little, industrial town of Shottery which is celebrated as the home of Anne Hathaway who became Shakespeare’s wife. The cottage where she lived when he wooed and won her still stands on the outskirts of the village and is just as it was at that time. It is a rather large building built of wood and plaster, covered with a thatched roof. The ceilings are low and the main room has a stone floor and a wide fireplace with a cozy chimney corner. Within the house are many relics of Anne Hathaway’s time, among which is a hand carved bedstead. This cottage and contents also is owned by the British nation.
Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway were married in 1582 when he was 18 and she was 26. Three years later Shakespeare was obliged to leave the country and go to the city to seek his fortune. He left his family behind, probably in the Hathaway cottage, and for 27 years he lived in London visiting Stratford only once a year.
Stratford-Upon-Avon is a country town of 8,000 to 9,000 inhabitants. The town is mentioned in a Saxon charter of the eighth century and coins have been found there showing that it was inhabited in the far away times of Roman occupation of England. It has been an agricultural center and a manufacturing town but now owes its fame almost entirely to Shakespeare.
Here he was born and spent his youth; here he lived during the closing years of his life, dying in 1616 in his house called New Place, and here is his grave in the Church of the Holy Trinity, on the bank of the lovely river Avon. The church is on the site of a Saxon monastery. The central tower was built in the twelfth century and the building was completed about 500 years ago. Near the tomb of Shakespeare are those of his wife and daughter.
The Shakespeare memori
al building, built in 1879, is on the bank of the river above the church. In this building is a theater where performances are given yearly, in April, and many Shakespearian treasures are kept here.
The Farm Home (32)
December 5, 1920
Among all the Americans who have crossed to France during the past few years probably no two saw the country alike at their landing, for no two persons in any place for the first time, are impressed by the same things. It is because of this that I venture to add to the many descriptions of Europe, these paragraphs from the letters of Rose Wilder Lane.
“I mailed my letter to you on shipboard,” she wrote. “Then I went out and saw the green land lifted above the sea—a green land like the California foothills, all marked in little squares with hedges of trees and dotted with slanting-roofed houses of stone, and church spires.
“We came to Cherbourg at 1 o’clock. Long, solid walls of masonry reached out into the water and the harbor was buttressed with old, moss-grown masonry above which were banks of smooth, green lawn. Two or three buildings—guard houses or something of the sort—could be seen with hundreds of little slits of windows in the gray stone, and slanting roofs as green with moss as the lawn with grass. And the water all around was as blue as San Francisco Bay.
“The tender came out about 4 o’clock and took us off and while the baggage was being transferred we sat for hours, and watched a baby-blue-and-pink sunset. Then we went around the long stone piers and into the inner harbor of Cherbourg, where there was a long, wide, smooth promenade. It was paraded by holidaying soldiers and French women, and short-jacketed, barelegged, little boys and full-skirted, capped little girls rolling hoops, with nurses in peasant costumes knitting and watching them.
“Beyond were the lovely, old streets with stone houses. There isn’t any use trying to describe them. I’ve read about French towns myself and never had the least idea how they looked. I can only say I stood on the deck and wept tears of joy. There isn’t any way to express it. France just ‘belongs,’ that’s all.
Laura Ingalls Wilder, Farm Journalist Page 31
