I'iioto by A. \V. Cutkr 



PEASANT WOMAN AT DEBRECZNY, HUNGARY, RETURNING FROM MARKET, WITH AN 

 ORDINARY EOAE OE BREAD ON HER BACK 



She carries on her head a straw hat, which she has bought for her husband. Her own 

 head-covering is similar to that of the woman she is walking with 



cadences of sorrow, yet lacking Attic 

 grace. 



No true Magyar of the Plain could 

 recite a battle lyric of Petofi to the end ; 

 its drunken glory would slay all utter- 

 ance. No pure Magyar could listen 

 without emotion to the story of the sor- 

 rows of Iluska, nor would the serious 

 beauty of such imaginative inlay work 

 as Balaton make vain appeal to the cul- 

 tured stranger. 



There is no Prometheus, no Electra, 

 no Udolpho, yet the weird and terrible 

 have seldom been so exquisitely com- 

 bined as in the greatest of all the sagas, 

 recording the somber march of Csaba's 

 spectral army, the bodies that cast no 

 shadow, every one La Tour d'Auvergne, 



"mort sur le champ de hataille," return- 

 ing to the far-off Asian home for sepul- 

 ture ; its rising from the dead and ap- 

 pearance in a moonless sky as it passed 

 along the firmament to battle for the last 

 time for its kin attacked in Transylvania. 



"Learned men call this the Milky Way. 

 The real name is Hadak titja, the 

 Path of the Warriors." 



These are the pure saga. The unwrit- 

 ten annals of the race are enshrined in 

 its music. There the patriot Magyar 

 turns for the sad chronicles of Hungary, 

 the well-beloved, and hears old dim tra- 

 ditions of a far-off Asian home of 



"that imperial palace whence he came" 

 in the soft and dreamv cadences of the 



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