THIRD DEVIL.

I. MARIA CZOBOR'S ROSE, THE PRECIPICE, AND THE OLD PEAR-TREE, 235
II. THREE SPARKS, 256
III. LITTLE VERONICA IS TAKEN AWAY, 276

Illustrations

"JOINED HANDS UNDER THE SACRED UMBRELLA" Frontispiece
"THE CHILD WAS IN THE BASKET" Facing p. 26

INTRODUCTION

Kalman Mikszath, perhaps the most purely national, certainly, after
Jokai, the most popular of all the Magyar novelists, was born at
Szklabonya, in the county of Nograd, on January 16th, 1849. Educated at
Rimaszombath and Pest, he adopted the legal profession, and settled down
as a magistrate in his native county, where his family had for
generations lived the placid, patriarchal life of small country squires.
A shrewd observer, with a strong satirical bent and an ardent love of
letters, the young advocate made his _debut_ as an author, at the age of
twenty-five, with a volume of short stories, which failed, however, to
catch the public taste. Shortly afterward he flitted to Szeged, and
contributed to the leading periodical there a series of sketches, whose
piquant humor and perfection of style attracted so much notice as to
encourage a bookseller in the famous city on the Theiss to publish, in
1881, another volume of tales, the epoch-making "Tot Atyafiak," which
was followed, four months later, by a supplementary volume, entitled "A
jo paloczok." Critics of every school instantly hailed these two little
volumes as the finished masterpieces of a new and entirely original
_genre_, the like of which had hitherto been unknown in Hungary. The
short story had, indeed, been previously cultivated, with more or less
of success, by earlier Magyar writers; but these first attempts had, for
the most part, been imitations of foreign novelists, mere exotics which
struck no deep root in the national literature. Mikszath was the first
to study from the life the peculiarities and characteristics of the
peasantry among whom he dwelt, the first to produce real, vivid pictures
of Magyar folk-life in a series of humoresks, dramas, idylls--call them
what you will--of unsurpassable grace and delicacy, seasoned with a
pleasantly pungent humor, but never without a sub-flavor of that tender
melancholy which lies at the heart of the Hungarian peasantry. And these
exquisite miniatures were set in the frame of a lucid, pregnant, virile
st