hey could to prove to the rest of the company how much
at ease they were in good German society.

Madame Krisbay seemed very contented with her neighbors, especially when
she discovered that the Rev. Samuel Rafanidesz was a bachelor. What! did
clergymen marry there? (Perhaps, after all, she had not come to such a
bad country!)

The schoolmaster was a much handsomer man, but he was older, and was,
besides, married. He had an intelligent face, and a long, flowing black
beard; he had, too, a certain amount of wit, which he dealt out in small
portions. Madame Krisbay smiled at his sallies. Poor woman! She would
have liked to have laughed at them, but did not dare to, for her throat
was still burning from the effects of that horrid paprika. Now and then
her face (which was otherwise like yellow wax) got quite red from the
efforts she made to keep from coughing, which, besides being the
forerunner of old age, she also considered very demeaning.

"Don't mind us, my dear," called out the mayor's wife, "cough away as
much as you like. A cough and poverty cannot be hidden."

Madame began to feel more and more at home, for, as it turned out, the
clergyman had been at school at Munich, and could tell a lot of
anecdotes of his life there, in the Munich dialect, much to madame's
delight. The Rev. Samuel Rafanidesz did not belong to the stiff,
unpleasant order of clergymen, and there was a Slovak sentence composed
by Teofil Klempa, often repeated by the good people of Babaszek, which
bore reference to him, and which, if read backward, gave his name:
"Szedi na fare, Rafanidesz" ("Stay in your parish, Rafanidesz".) But he
never took this advice, and had already been sent away from one living
(somewhere in Nograd) because of an entanglement with some lady in the
parish. Mrs. Mravucsan knew the whole story, and even the lady, a
certain Mrs. Baho. She must have been a silly woman, for it was she
herself who let the cat out of the bag, to her own husband too; and she
was not a beauty either, as we can see from Mrs. Mravucsan's words:

"Rafanidesz was a fool. You should never ask a kiss from an ugly woman,
nor a loan from a poor man, for they immediately go and boast of it."

Thus Mrs. Mravucsan. It is true she added:

"But if any one were to call me as a witness, I should deny the whole
thing."

So you see, I can't stand good for the truth of it either. But that is
neither here nor there.

Madame Krisbay certainly enjoyed the comp