Page:Glimpses of Bohemia by MacDonald (1882).pdf/53

 cigar factory, employing 3000 women. I once saw them come out from work, and it was an extraordinary sight, so many women, and not a man visible, except the porter, a gigantic old soldier, who looked all the bigger that the girls streaming past him were mostly small and slim. Cigar-making is not a healthy employment, and the appearance of these poor girls is said to have cured some men, if not of smoking, at least of smoking cigars.

Close to the cigar factory is a church, in the crypt of which is a huge collection of human bones. In many parts of Europe, even in England, one sees “bone houses;” but I have never seen or heard of one so beautifully arranged as this. As you enter the staircase to descend into the crypt, you are confronted by a shield formed of the larger bones, with the Schwarzenberg arms (Prince Schwarzenberg is Lord of the Manor), wrought with finger and toe bones. At the sides are large vases, the rims of which are formed of skulls. When you get to the floor you find yourself between four pyramids of skulls, reaching from floor to ceiling; while festoons formed of an alternate skull and fore-arm hang between. There are chandeliers and candlesticks, even crucifixes, all of bone, and on the confessional box a death’s head and cross bones, not in paint, but in grim reality. In a side room one is shown skulls of men killed in battle, with all the marks of various weapons; so that one may study the different fractures caused by stones, bullets, shells, swords, or maces. This terrible collection had been recently arranged when I visited it in 1874, and I was told that it now contains only one-fifth of the bones which formerly lay in the church. The bones were, I understand, mostly bleached in the battlefields of the neighbourhood. They are certainly clean and well preserved, and to me there was nothing repulsive or fearsome in the sight, but I did feel that there was something sacrilegious and outrageous to natural feeling in this treatment of human remains. The church is a great place of pilgrimage at certain seasons of the year.

The Synod of the Bohemian section of the Church was to meet at Prague on the 13th October, but unfortunately neither of us was able