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"In Cracow," he said, "they are all words." "There are certain men, it appears," continued Kosmaroff, "in the service of the governments in one service it is called 'foreign affairs, in another the 'secret service' whose mission it is to find themselves where things are stirring, to be at the seat of war. They are, in jest, called the Vultures. It is a French jest, as you would conclude.
My plan was to sight a spire, and then walk to the root of it, so to speak. In this manner I saw the town very well. The houses were of brick and plaster, the rich carmine-red brick that has made Cracow so beautiful.
I travelled from village to village as a singing girl, and once I was driven away with stones by villagers set upon me by a fanatical priest. I came by Cracow, and across the Carpathians, helped to pass the lines by a Hungarian Lieutenant but I tricked him of his reward; I was not ready for that sacrifice.
The threads of Zurdoki's crafty policy had been woven together in the letter deciphered by Valentine Kalondai, and Zurdoki was one of those who were perpetually urging the ambitious George Rakoczy to conquer Poland. The governorship of Cracow was the prize reserved for himself, and the prospect of the loss of that lucrative post piqued him exceedingly.
Her other forces, which several weeks ago boasted that they were about to capture Cracow, will soon be driven out of Przemysl and Lemberg. Libau will fall into our hands. Riga is sure to be ours, and Warsaw itself will finally admit our victorious troops. Does this look like defeat at the hands of our enemies? And German soil is still as immune from invasion as though it were girded by the sea."
Schurer, for example, the Strasburg printer, was M.A. of Cracow in 1494; and some idea of the condition of learning there may be gained from a book-seller's letter to Aldus from Cracow, December 1505, ordering 100 copies of Constantine Lascaris' Greek grammar. For some months Ellenbog heard lectures there on astronomy, which remained a favourite subject with him throughout his life.
And now here he was back in Poland, with a Russian name for daily use and another name hidden in his heart that had blazed all over Poland once. Here he was, a raftsman plying between Cracow and Warsaw, those two hot-beds of Polish patriotism a mere piece of human driftwood on the river. He had made the usual grand tour of Russia's deadliest enemies. He had been to Siberia and Paris and London.
Few cattle fed on the pastures, and stunted crops of grain ripened in the melancholy light. From Cracow to Warsaw is a distance of one hundred and thirty leagues, if the postilion lied not, yet on that road we met but two carriages and not more than a dozen carts. Scattering wooden villages, each a line of hovels, appeared at long intervals.
In Cracow they called for a Great Poland; in Budapest for an unmolested Hungary; in Prague for a united Czech State; and in Innsbruck the descendants of Andreas Hofer were fighting as they did in his day for their sacred land, Tyrol. In Vienna they asked only for peace and quiet.
They are black, sturdy, uncouth country folk, good-natured and simple, talkative to a degree, and yet far more silent and brooding than the crowds of the Rhine-pfalz, or Naples, or Cracow. They drink considerable quantities of whiskey, but do not get very drunk; they talk and laugh loudly at times, but seldom quarrel or fight.
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