no better caparisoned than if it had belonged to some son of the puszta, or steppes.

Quietly, and with eyes and ears both on the alert,[Pg 12] he rode round the height on which the fortress stood.

[Pg 12]

"If I don't see anything," he said to himself with a laugh, "they don't see me; let's be off!

"Eh, and yet I should be glad if I could come across a human being of some sort, if he were no bigger than the rowel of my spur.—Hi! hi there, földi [countryman]," cried the horseman all at once, as he caught sight of some one trudging along the road round the shoulder of the hill.

The wayfarer thus addressed turned and came up to him, and as soon as he was within speaking distance he said in humble tones, "Uram [sir], I am hungry; I have not eaten a morsel to-day. Have pity on me, kegyelmed[1] [your grace]."

[1] A common form of polite address in Hungarian.

[1]

Then he cast a glance, not altogether devoid of envy, at the dainty horseman, who was so comfortably clad, and who looked, to judge by his countenance, as if his hunger had been well satisfied.

"Here," said the rider, giving the beggar a small coin; for the boy attracted him, and he thought to himself that he could hardly ever remember to have seen a face with such a peculiarly taking expression. Moreover, in spite of the mud and dirt with which his[Pg 13] skin was incrusted, it was impossible not to be struck by his fine features, which were of a purely Oriental type, and lighted up by a pair of large dark eyes as black as the raven's wing.

[Pg 13]

The man on horseback had given the lad a trifle on the spur of the moment, because he looked so poverty-stricken; but a second glance made him fancy, rightly or wrongly, that he was not a beggar of the common sort, to whom people give careless alms because he stirs their pity for the moment. This beggar excited something more and better than mere pity—at least in the man before us. Some people, it is true, might not have noticed the expression of the lad's face; but to those who had eyes it told of something more than poverty and distress. It was not the look of the beggar who is content to be a beggar, who would rather beg than work, rather live upon others than labour for himself. One might almost fancy, indeed, that the lad 

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