sentation of the old world at all. Not
only did the boundaries of the realm suffer strange permutations, but
the classical termination "grad,"[5] unusual and unnatural as it seemed
to all but the initiated, was tacked on pretty frequently to the names
of purely Hungarian towns both small and great; and there was also
noticeable this slight and fanciful deviation from the strict truth, to
wit, that whereas cities of unappropriatable Asiatic origin like
Debreczen, Kecskemet, Nagy-Koeros, and others, appeared degraded into
insignificant villages by being marked with tiny points, every little
twopenny-halfpenny Slavonic village in the Carpathians was magnified
into a cathedral city, or starred to represent a formidable fortress.

[Footnote 5: The Slavonic word for "town," thus Constantinople is
Tsargrad.]

The worthy paedagogue used to sit brooding over this map for hours. He
would draw his boundaries with a pair of compasses, construct imaginary
roads from town to town, and reconstruct a fortress from the imposing
ruins in the bed of the River Waag. Nay, he even ventured upon the
audacious experiment of cutting through the mountain chain separating
the River Hernad from the River Poprad, and uniting these two rivers (in
a state of nature they flow in diametrically opposite directions) into
one broad continuous water-course, thus bringing together all the
various branches of that scattered family of kindred nations which
dwells between the White Sea and the Black.

In those days very little was known among us of railways beyond the
rumour (the newspapers mentioned it as a sort of curiosity) that a
certain Englishman, called William Griffiths, wanted to make a
wheel-track of iron. Thomas Bodza's idea therefore of a continuous
European waterway almost deserved to be called sublime.

Such exaltation is innocent enough in itself. It is found, more or less,
in every race, and is especially vigorous wherever an impoverished,
orphaned stock is aware of the existence of a powerful, dominating,
gigantic kinsman beyond a mountain range.[6] Unfortunately, however,
this exaltation did not remain an empty poetical dream in the bosom of
our village paedagogue.

[Footnote 6: _E.g._, The Slovaks in north Hungary, who know that Russia
lies beyond the Carpathians.]

Even as a student his heart was full of a bitter hatred of everything
Hungarian. He went to school at Pressburg, that peculiar town where the
traders are German, the gentr