ial servants of
patriotism and the right, was not to be extinct with Prince Andras.
Hungary, whose future seemed brightening; needed the Zilahs in the
future as she had needed them in the past.

"I have only one objection to make to this marriage," said Varhely; "it
should have taken place sooner." But a man can not command his heart
to love at a given hour. When very young, Andras Zilah had cared for
scarcely anything but his country; and, far from her, in the bitterness
of exile, he had returned to the passion of his youth, living in Paris
only upon memories of his Hungary. He had allowed year after year to
roll by, without thinking of establishing a home of his own by marriage.
A little late, but with heart still warm, his spirit young and ardent,
and his body strengthened rather than worn out by life, Prince Andras
gave to a woman's keeping his whole being, his soul with his name,
the one as great as the other. He was about to marry a girl of his own
choice, whom he loved romantically; and he wished to give a surrounding
of poetic gayety to this farewell to the past, this greeting to the
future. The men of his race, in days gone by, had always displayed a
gorgeous, almost Oriental originality: the generous eccentricities
of one of Prince Andras's ancestors, the old Magyar Zilah, were often
cited; he it was who made this answer to his stewards, when, figures in
hand, they proved to him, that, if he would farm out to some English or
German company the cultivation of his wheat, corn, and oats, he would
increase his revenue by about six hundred thousand francs a year:

"But shall I make these six hundred thousand francs from the nourishment
of our laborers, farmers, sowers, and gleaners? No, certainly not; I
would no more take that money from the poor fellows than I would take
the scattered grains from the birds of the air."

It was also this grandfather of Andras, Prince Zilah Ferency, who, when
he had lost at cards the wages of two hundred masons for an entire year,
employed these men in constructing chateaux, which he burned down at
the end of the year to give himself the enjoyment of fireworks upon
picturesque ruins.

The fortune of the Zilahs was then on a par with the almost fabulous,
incalculable wealth of the Esterhazys and Batthyanyis. Prince Paul
Esterhazy alone possessed three hundred and fifty square leagues of
territory in Hungary. The Zichys, the Karolyis and the Szchenyis,
poorer, had but two hundred