dant of any delinquency, for the lieutenant was not allowed to
punish anyone. As one or more of the able-bodied men belonging to a
house might be absent for a long time on military service or in
captivity, or else through sickness or wounds be unfit to work, and
through lack of means the householder not be in a position to hire
day-labourers, in that case his fellow-villagers, one after another,
were obliged to assist him without payment. In order that all possible
respect should be attached to the chief man and woman of a house--the
house-father and house-mother--these were not liable to punishment for
small offences, and if a considerable offence made it necessary to
punish them, then they were first of all deposed from their position.
Various public posts were filled by the house-fathers or other men,
and for refusing to accept such a post a man was commonly arrested;
but this punishment, as well as that of so many strokes with a cane
(which seems to have been the most usual penalty), was abolished by
1850. The military frontier system came to an end in 1872, at which
time the communal life, which had been found to be very irksome, was
also gradually done away with. Franzfeld is now a prosperous and
peaceful place; their horses are well known, they breed excellent
cattle and pigs and sheep, and they say of themselves that out of one
Franzfeld man you can make a couple of Jews and there will still
remain a Franzfeld man. They tell how once or twice a Hungarian Jew
has opened a shop in the village, selling his goods very cheaply for
two or three months, at a lower price, in fact, than he paid for them,
and then putting up the prices; but as soon as he does that he is
boycotted. The aliens who have settled in Franzfeld--Hungarians,
Slovaks and Roumanians--have come as servants, have married Franzfeld
girls and are looked upon as Germans. The same German dialect is
spoken as in Wuertemberg; troops from that country marched through
Franzfeld during the War. But Serbian, the villagers told me, is the
international language of at any rate western Banat, in spite of the
Magyars who, as in other parts, made for the last few years of their
domination extreme efforts on behalf of their unlovely language. They
supplied Franzfeld with schoolmasters and mistresses who could speak
no German and no Serbian, so that it was very difficult for both
sides. And the authorities told the pastor that the chief truths of
religion, they consid