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قراءة كتاب "O Thou, My Austria!"
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class="pginternal" tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a">CHAPTER XXVII.
Baron Franz.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
A Short Visit.
CHAPTER XXIX.
Submission.
CHAPTER XXX.
Persecution.
CHAPTER XXXI.
Consolation.
CHAPTER XXXII.
Interrupted Harmony.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
Early Sunrise.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
Struggles.
CHAPTER XXXV.
A Slanderer.
CHAPTER XXXVI.
Failure.
CHAPTER XXXVII.
A Visit.
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
At Last.
CHAPTER XXXIX.
The Dinner.
CHAPTER XL.
A Farewell.
CHAPTER XLI.
Resolve.
CHAPTER XLII.
Found.
CHAPTER XLIII.
Count Hans.
CHAPTER XLIV.
Spring.
CHAPTER XLV.
Old Baron Franz.
"O THOU, MY AUSTRIA!"
CHAPTER I.
A MANUSCRIPT MISAPPROPRIATED.
"Krupitschka, is it going to rain?" Major von Leskjewitsch asked his servant, who had formerly been his corporal. The major was leaning out of a window of his pretty vine-wreathed country-seat, smoking a chibouque; Krupitschka, in the garden below, protected by a white apron, and provided with a dark-green champagne-bottle, was picking the Spanish flies from off the hawthorn-bushes. At his master's question, he looked up, gazed at a few clouds on the horizon, replied, "Don't know--maybe, and then again maybe not," and deftly entrapped three victims at once in the long neck of his bottle. A few days previous he had made a very satisfactory bargain with the apothecary of the neighbouring little town for Spanish flies.
"Ass! Have you just got back from the Delphic oracle?" the major exclaimed, angrily, turning away from the window.
At the words "Delphic oracle," Krupitschka pricked up his ears. It annoyed him to have his master and the other gentlemen make use of words that he did not understand, and he determined to buy a foreign dictionary with the proceeds of the sale of his cantharides. Meanwhile, he noted down, in a dilapidated memorandum-book, "delphin wrackle," muttering the while, "What sort of team is that, I wonder?"
Unable to extort any prognosis of the weather from Krupitschka, the major turned to the barometer; but that stood, as it had done uninterruptedly for the past fortnight, at 'Changeable.'
"Blockhead!" growled the major, shaking the barometer a little to rouse it from its lethargy; and then, seating himself at the grand piano, he thundered away at a piece of music familiar to all the country round as "The Major's Triumphal March." All the country round was likewise familiar with the date of the origin of this effective work,--the spring of 1866.
At that time the major had composed this march with the patriotic intention of dedicating it to the victorious General Benedek, but the melancholy events of the brief summer campaign left him no desire to do so, and the march was never published; nevertheless, the major played it himself now and then, to his own immense satisfaction and to the horror of his really musical wife.
This wife, a Northern German by birth, fair and dignified in appearance, sat rocking comfortably in an American chair, reading the latest number of the German Illustrated News, while her husband amused himself at the piano.
The major banged away at the keys in a fury of enthusiasm,