the gentry by their nicknames only--Mike, Andy,
Larry, Fred, Ned, for instance. Me they call Jock, remember."

Half an hour later Mike was back again, dressed as a gentleman.

In the drinking-room there was fun enough going on already even without
him; for there the rule was, Welcome everybody, and wait for nobody. The
master of the house introduced the newly arrived guest as Michael Kis,
Esq., lord of the manor of Nadudvar, who, "like a jolly good fellow,"
had come disguised as an ostler to the Whitsun Kingship competition, and
there acquitted himself like a man.

Every one thought this a most original joke. It was plain to every eye,
moreover, that he was a gentleman and no boor. All his movements,
whether he lolled back on a chair, or leaned his elbows on the table, or
chucked his cap in a corner--_betyar_ tricks every one of them--was
proof positive that he must have been brought up in good circles. A real
_betyar_ would never have dared to lift up his head here; but this
fellow, metaphorically speaking, buttonholed everybody. In a few
moments, in fact, Mike had drunk good-fellowship with the whole company,
and become as familiar as if he had lived among them all his life.

Meanwhile the eternal bumper began to circulate, and Mike fell to
singing a new drinking-song which none of them knew, and the company
took it up with spirit; and, more than that, it was better than any they
had ever sung before.

Within an hour Mike had become a perfect hero in that genteel circle. In
his cups he far outstripped them all; and when it came to card-playing,
he won whole heaps of money from all and sundry without moving a muscle
of his face, raking the dollars in with as much _sangfroid_ as if he had
sacks of them at home. Nay, he even lent a lot to Franky Kalotai,
thereby obviously displaying an utter contempt for money, for it was
notorious that Franky never paid anything back.

And now the heads of most of the gentlemen engaged in this drinking-bout
began to loll about unsteadily. Everybody had got beyond the limit where
the good humour begotten of good wine ends and drunkenness begins; when
a man no longer tastes his wine, and is only sensible of a giddy
hankering for more. At such times Bandi Kutyfalvi was wont to exhibit
his ancient _tour-de-force_, which consisted in swallowing with
outstretched neck a whole bumper of wine at one gulp or, to use his own
technical expression, without a single hiccough. Now, such a feat