eration which he shares with Hoher Aladar, who is the village
justice of the peace, and with Eros Bela, who is my lord the Count's
bailiff.

Then lower down, beyond the church, is the big barn belonging to Ignacz
Goldstein, where on special occasions, as well as on fine Sunday
afternoons, the young folk meet for their simple-hearted, innocent
amusements--for their dancing, their singing and their courtships, and
further on still are the houses of the poorer peasants--of men like
Kapus Benko who has never saved a filler and until lately, when he was
stricken down with illness, had to work as a day labourer for wage,
instead of owning a bit of land of his own and planting it up for his
own enjoyment. Here the houses are much smaller and squalid-looking:
they have no verandahs--only a narrow door and tiny, diminutive windows
which are not made to open and shut. The pieces of ground around them
are also planted, like the others, with hemp and with sunflowers, but
even these look less majestic, less prosperous than those which surround
the houses higher up the streets; their brown heads are smaller, more
sparsely laden with the good oil-bearing seeds, and the stems of the
hemp do not look as if they ever would make a thatch.

The street itself is wide and a regular heat-trap in summer: in the
autumn and the spring it is ankle-deep in mud, and of course in the
winter it is buried in snow. But in the late summer it is at its best,
one or two heavy showers of rain have laid the dust, and the sunflowers
and dahlias round the little school-house and by the presbytery are very
gay--such a note of crude and vivid colour which even puts the decorated
jars to shame.

Also the sun has lost some of its unbearable heat; after four o'clock in
the afternoon it is pleasant to sit or stand outside one's house for a
bit of gossip with a neighbour. The brown-legged, black-eyed children,
coolly clad in loose white shifts, bare-footed and bare-headed, can play
outside now; the little girls, with bright-coloured kerchiefs tied round
their heads, and pink or blue petticoats round their waists, vie with
the dahlias in hue.

On Sunday afternoons it is cool enough to dance in Ignacz Goldstein's
barn. The black day in the calendar--the fourteenth of September--has
come and gone, and the lads have gone with it: except for the weeping
mothers and sweethearts the ordinary village life has resumed its
peaceful course. But then, there are every year a