" swept the Roman legions from the face of Pannonia; he had learnt
from the Spanish historian all about Ferdinand VII., who chased the
Moors from the Alhambra where they had held sway for hundreds of years;
he had read of the Scythian Bertezena, who, starting in life as a simple
smith had delivered his race from the grinding yoke of the Geougs;--and
finally he had not only read but learnt by heart all the great works of
our savants in which it is demonstrated with the most exact scholarship
and the most inflexible logic, that the Greeks, the Marahas, the
Spaniards, the Scythians, and, in fact, all the most famous nations of
the earth have originated from a single powerful race which numbers
among its chiefest branches, such noble nations as the Russians, the
Poles, the Bohemians, and the Croats, &c., inasmuch as the languages of
all these various nations are so crammed with original Slavonic words,
that if these words were suddenly demanded back from them by their
rightful owners, any sort of verbal intercourse amongst the nations in
question would be henceforth impossible.

All this Thomas Bodza had read and crammed into his head. Once he had
even written a dissertation in which, with astonishing profundity and
ingenuity, he had demonstrated the striking resemblance and the
identical significance of the Greek {~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON~}
{~GREEK SMALL LETTER NU~} and the Slavonic _tiszi_, which
dissertation was received with general applause in the local mutual
improvement society where he recited it.

In his library were to be found all those learned tomes which do our
dear native land the honour of only noticing her in order to disparage
her, attributing _inter alia_ a Slavonic origin to all our chief towns,
and forcing upon us the crushing conviction that we Hungarians cannot
even call a single water-course our own, inasmuch as all our rivers rise
in other countries--certainly a most depressing, poverty-stricken state
of things, especially as regards our cattle dealers and boatmen, who, of
course, can do so little without water.

After long-continued scientific investigations, materially assisted by a
vigorous imagination, Thomas Bodza had constructed a map of his own, in
which the various countries appeared in a shape diverging essentially
from that which they actually occupy, and indeed only the figure of the
virgin Europa, and the outlines of the unchangeable water-courses made
one suspect that it was a repre