ccurring meanwhile, had been managed by a
legally appointed trustee. What wrath and raging there was! The
regulation of property-ownership had been executed during the
trusteeship, and as Abonyi believed, with outrageous curtailment and
robbery of the lords of the estate. The best, most fertile fields--so
he asserted--had been allotted to the parish, the most sandy, barren
tracts of the land to him; the parish had the beautiful oak forest,
which had already been shamefully ravaged, he, on the other hand,
received the reed-grown, marshy border of the stream; in the division
of the pasturage the peasants had the easily cultivated plain, which
was therefore at once ploughed by the new owners, he, on the contrary,
the gravelly, steep hillside; in short, he was almost insane with rage
when he first saw what the commission had made of his land, and the
trustee who had unresistingly agreed to all these unjust acts would
have fared badly, if he could have laid hands upon him the first time
he went to inspect the bounds of the parish. There was nothing for him
to do, however, except to adapt himself to the new state of affairs as
well as he could; for nothing could be accomplished by indictments,
because the trustee had possessed full legal authority to act, and
everything had been done in strict accordance with the law. Far less
could he hope to effect anything by violence, since peasants understand
no jesting if their beloved acres are touched, and, at the first sign
of any intention on his part to disturb their possessions, would
quickly have set fire to his house and, moreover, tattooed on his body,
with the tines of a pitchfork, a protest to which a counter-plea would
scarcely have been possible. Only he could never carry self-control
and composure so far that, after nearly twenty years' habitude, he did
not become furiously excited at the sight of certain pieces of land,
and experience something akin to a paroxysm of longing to shoot, like a
mad dog, the first peasant who came in his way.

The disposition to command, which he had indulged from childhood, he
was unwilling even now to renounce. Under existing circumstances his
name and property alone would certainly no longer permit him to indulge
this habit, so he sought an office. When the Austrian magistrates were
removed in Hungary and the ancient county government restored, Abonyi
had only needed to express the wish, and the "congregation" of the
county, which c