r service, your honour."

"Well, Mike, you are a fine young fellow. You please me greatly. So now
you are going to be Whitsun King for a whole year, eh? What will you do
with yourself all that time?"

The youth twisted his blonde moustache upwards, and steadily regarded
the ceiling.

"I really don't know. I only know that I shall be a bigger man than ever
before."

"And if at the end of the year you are deposed?"

"Then I shall go back to my stable at Nadudvar, from whence I came."

"Have you neither father nor mother?"

"I have no belongings at all. I have never seen either father or
mother."

"Then stop where you are, Mike. What if I make a bigger man of you than
you yourself have any idea of; make you take your place in genteel
society here; give you as much money as you like, to drink and play
cards with; and turn you into Michael Kis, Esq., lord of the manor of
Nadudvar?"

"I shouldn't mind, but how to conduct myself so that they may take me
for a gentleman, I don't know."

"The bigger blackguard you are, the greater gentleman they'll take you
to be. It is only our rustics who are modest and respectful nowadays."

"If that be all, I am ready."

"I'll take you with me everywhere. You shall drink, dice, bully, brawl,
cudgel the men, and befool the women to the top of your bent. At the end
of twelve months your Whitsun Kingship will be over, you will doff your
genteel mummery, and become the leader of my heydukes. You shall then
don the red _mente_, and wait upon those very gentlemen with whom you
have been drinking and dicing for a whole year; you shall help into
their carriages the same little wenches with whom you used to make
merry. I consider that a very good joke. I don't know whether you think
so, too? How the gentlemen will curse and the ladies blush when they
find out who you were!"

The youth reflected for a moment; but then he threw back his head, and
cried--

"All right! I don't care."

Master Jock looked at his watch. "It is now a quarter to four. Remember
that. At a quarter to four twelve months hence your gentility, your
nobility, will cease. _Till_ then you are just as much a gentleman as
the rest of us. Every month you will receive from me a thousand florins
plunder money. The first thousand is in this reticule. Now be off! My
heydukes will dress you. When you are ready, come down to my
drinking-room. Be rude to the servants, especially as they know you to
be but a boor, and call