that would soften a stone. Panna wept a little, too, then they remained together until long after noon and, in the evening, went to the spinning-room and presented themselves as betrothed lovers. Three weeks after they were married amid a great crowd of the villagers, some of whom pitied Pista, others Panna, and from that time until the moment when the incidents about to be described occurred, they lived together five years in a loyal, model marriage.

CHAPTER III.

Besides the church and the tile-roofed town hall built of stone, the main street of Kisfalu contained only one edifice of any pretension, the manor or, as it is called in Hungary, "the castle" of Herr von Abonyi. It was really a very ordinary structure, only it had a second story, stood on an artificial mound, to which on both sides there was a very gentle ascent, and above the ever open door was a moss-grown escutcheon, grey with age, on which a horseman, with brandished sword, could be discerned in vague outlines, worn by time and weather.

The owner of this mansion, Herr von Abonyi, was a bachelor about fifty years old.

His family had lived more than three hundred years on their ancestral estates, which, it is true, were now considerably diminished, and he was connected by ties of blood or marriage with all the nobility in the county of Pesth. Up to the year 1848 the whole village of Kisfalu, with all its peasants, fields, and feudal prerogatives (such as mill, fish, tavern and other privileges) belonged to the Abonyis, and the present lord, Carl von Abonyi, came from that gloomy time, termed—I know not why—"patriarchal," when the peasant had no rights, and the nobleman dwelt in his castle like a little god, omnipotent, unapproachable, only not all-wise and all-good, walked through his village whip in hand, like an American "Massa," and dealt the peasant a blow across the face if he did not bow humbly and quickly enough, ordered the village Jew to be brought to the manor, stretched on a bench by two strong lackeys (called in Hungary heiducks) and soundly thrashed whenever he felt a desire for cheap amusement; regarded the women of the village, without exception, as his natural harem, spent his days and nights in immoderate feasting and wild drinking, derived all his education from the Bible with 32 leaves (the number of cards contained in the pack commonly used in the country), and only displayed to ladies of his own station a certain romantic chivalry, which was manifested in rude brawling with real or imaginary rivals, unrestricted duelling on the most trivial pretext, exaggerated gallantry and ardent homage, serenades which lasted all night long under the windows of the favoured fair, and similar impassioned, but tasteless eccentricities. At the present time all this has certainly greatly changed, but many of the nobles who, in the year 1848, the period of the vast transformation, had partly or wholly attained maturity, could not or would not adapt themselves wholly to the new era; in their inmost hearts they still consider themselves the sovereign lords of the soil and its inhabitants, and it is with rage and gnashing of teeth that they force themselves not to display this feeling in words and deeds at every opportunity.

Abonyi, an only son, was a lieutenant in the Palatine Hussars, when the revolution of 1848 broke out. He at once joined the honveds with his troop and, in their ranks, performed, until the close of the war for freedom, prodigies of daring on every battle field, rising, in spite of his youth, within less than eleven months, to the rank of lieutenant-colonel. After the disaster of Vilagos, he fled from the country and spent several years in Turkey as a cavalry officer. In 1860, he again returned home and took possession of his estates, which since his father's death, occurring meanwhile, had been managed by a legally appointed trustee. What wrath and raging there was! The regulation of property-ownership had been executed during the trusteeship, and as Abonyi believed, with outrageous curtailment and robbery of the lords of the estate. The best, most fertile fields—so he asserted—had been allotted to the parish, the most sandy, barren tracts of the land to him; the parish had the beautiful oak forest, which had already been shamefully ravaged, he, on the other hand, received the reed-grown, marshy border of the stream; in the division of the pasturage the peasants had the easily cultivated plain, which was therefore at once ploughed by the new owners, he, on the contrary, the gravelly, steep hillside; in short, he was almost insane with rage when he first saw what the commission had made of his land, and the trustee who had unresistingly agreed to all these unjust acts would have fared badly, if he could have laid hands upon him the first time he went to inspect the bounds of the parish. There was nothing for him to do, however, except to adapt himself to the new state of affairs as well as he could; for nothing could be accomplished by indictments, because the trustee had possessed full legal authority to act, and everything had been done in strict accordance with the law. Far less could he hope to effect anything by violence, since peasants understand no jesting if their beloved acres are touched, and, at the first sign of any intention on his part to disturb their possessions, would quickly have set fire to his house and, moreover, tattooed on his body, with the tines of a pitchfork, a protest to which a counter-plea would scarcely have been possible. Only he could never carry self-control and composure so far that, after nearly twenty years' habitude, he did not become furiously excited at the sight of certain pieces of land, and experience something akin to a paroxysm of longing to shoot, like a mad dog, the first peasant who came in his way.

The disposition to command, which he had indulged from childhood, he was unwilling even now to renounce. Under existing circumstances his name and property alone would certainly no longer permit him to indulge this habit, so he sought an office. When the Austrian magistrates were removed in Hungary and the ancient county government restored, Abonyi had only needed to express the wish, and the "congregation" of the county, which consisted almost exclusively of his relatives and friends, elected him president of the tribune[1] of his district.

Now he could imagine himself transported back to the fine old feudal times before the March revolution. The peasants were again obliged to raise their hats humbly to him, his hand dispensed justice and mercy, the ancestral rod was brandished at his sign, and the whipping bench, a pleasing symbol of his power, always stood ready below the windows of his castle. When he drove through the country on official business or pleasure, his carriage was drawn by four horses with a harness hung with bells; if a peasant's cart was in the way and did not hasten at the sound of the familiar little bells to move out, the heiduck in coloured livery, with a sword at his side, sitting by the driver, shouted an order and an oath to the laggard, and the coachman, while dashing by, dealt the disrespectful loiterer a well-aimed blow. He might even fare still worse if the humor happened to seize the grandee in the spring carriage.

It would no longer do to get the village Jew and have him flogged for pastime on long afternoons; but there were still gipsies who were summoned to the castle to make sport for the noble lord. They played their bewitching melodies, and if he was filled with genuine delight, he gave the fiddlers, right and left, an enthusiastic slap in the face which echoed noisily, then took a banknote from his pocket-book, spit upon it and clapped it on the swollen cheeks of the howling gipsies, whereupon they again grinned joyfully and played on with two-fold energy.

Although Abonyi was a pattern magistrate, at the second election, which according