st look as if they had accomplished
something very sensible.

"Get through with it quickly and come to your village, for I am here
at the command of the Prince to ask some lawful questions."

"And I," said Zulfikar, "at the command of the mighty Pasha of Nagy
Varad, to impose a new tax."

The Wallachians looked after the Lieutenant in silence until he
vanished from their sight, and then said with clenched fists:

"May Tuesday evening carry him off!" And then they moved off with the
bagpiper at their head singing as they went to the village.

* * * * *

It was a small straggling Wallachian village into which the Lieutenant
rode with his comrade. One house was just like another; mud huts with
high roofs, projecting rafters, and enclosed within quick set hedges.
The doors were so low that one must stoop to enter. Every house
consisted of a single room in which the entire family lived, together
with hens and goats.

At the entrance to the village was a large triumphal arch of stone,
and over the main gate was the torso of a Minerva. In front were
figures of a battle finely cut, and underneath an inscription in large
letters in Latin: "This town the invincible Trojan had built in memory
of his triumph." Behind this were miserable mud huts.

Before a house of mourning on the capital of a fallen Corinthian
column sat Prefika, the oldest of the old women of the village,
weeping paid tears over the corpse of the young woman on the bier
within.

In front of a grass-grown hill was a grand stone building. In former
times it might have been a temple erected to the memory of some Roman
hero, but now the Wallachian villagers had made it their church,
covering the temple with a pointed roof and spoiling the interior with
dreadful paintings. For lack of any other public place the Lieutenant
called the people together in this church. The setting sun through the
round panes, lighted up strangely the interior of this old building
with its walls covered from top to bottom with hideous pictures of
saints, whom the monstrous fancies of peasant artists had clad in red
cloaks and spurred boots. Among the many pictures was the well-known
allegory which represents Death dragging off a king, a beggar and a
priest. And scattered among the pictures of the saints were those
representing devils with tongues outstretched, holding sinners by the
hair of the head. Behind the altar stood the village priest and the