may be--lads from Hungarian villages go there
sound in body and in limb and come back bent with ague, halt, lame or
blind.

Three years! More like for ever!

And therefore the whole population of Marosfalva and of the villages
round spends its last happy four-and-twenty hours in trying to forget
that nine o'clock of the fourteenth day of September is approaching with
sure and giant strides; everyone has a wish to forget; the parents and
grandparents, the sisters, the sweethearts, the lads themselves! The
future is so hideous, let the joy of the present kill all thoughts of
those coming three years.

Marosfalva is the rallying-point, where this final annual jollification
takes place. They all come over on the thirteenth from Fekete and Gorcz,
and Kender, in order to dance and to sing at Marosfalva in the barn
which belongs to Ignacz Goldstein the Jew. Marosfalva boasts of a
railway station and it is from here that at nine o'clock in the morning
the lads will be entrained; so all day on the thirteenth there has been
a pilgrimage along the cross-roads from the outlying villages and
hamlets round Marosfalva--a stream of men and women and young children
all determined to forget for a few hours the coming separation of the
morrow; by five o'clock in the afternoon all those had assembled who had
meant to come and dancing in the barn had begun.

Ignacz Goldstein's barn has always been the setting in which the final
drama of the happy year is acted. After that night spent there in
dancing and music and merry-making, down goes the curtain on the comedy
of life and the tragedy of tears begins.

Since five o'clock in the afternoon the young people have been
dancing--waltzing, polkaing, dancing the csardas--mostly the csardas,
the dance of the nation, of the people, the most exhilarating, most
entrancing, most voluptuous dance that feet of man have ever trod. The
girls and lads are indefatigable, the slow and languorous Lassu (slow
movement) alternates with the mad, merry csardas, they twirl and twist,
advance, retreat, separate and reunite in a mad, intoxicating whirl.
Small booted feet stamp on the rough wooden floor, sending up clouds of
dust. What matter if the air becomes more and more stifling? There are
tears and sighs to be stifled too.

"Ho, there, czigany! Play up! Faster! Faster! 'Tis not a funeral dirge
you are playing."

The gipsy musicians, hot and perspiring, have blown and scraped and
banged for fifteen soli