He was born in Koloszvar, where
his father was a professor in the university, and there he grew up with
three brothers and a sister, in a comfortable home. He always had had a
great desire to see travel, and from early childhood developed a special
fondness for gymnastic feats. The thought of a circus made him fairly
wild. On rare occasions a travelling show visited this Transylvanian
town, and his parents with difficulty restrained him from following the
circus away. At last, in 1873, one show, more complete and more
brilliant than any one before seen there, came in on the newly opened
railway, and he, now a man, went away with it, unable longer to restrain
his passion for the profession. Always accustomed to horses, and already
a skilful acrobat, he was immediately accepted by the manager as an
apprentice, and after a season in Roumania and a disastrous trip through
Southern Austria, they came into Northern Italy, where I met him.

Whenever he spoke of his early life he always became quiet and
depressed, and for a long time I believed that he brooded over his
mistake in exchanging a happy home for the vicissitudes of Bohemia. It
came out slowly, however, that he was haunted by a superstition, a
strange and ingenious one, which was yet not without a certain show of
reason for its existence. Little by little I learned the following facts
about it: His father was of pure Szeklar or original Hungarian stock, as
dark-skinned as a Hindoo, and his mother was from one of the families of
Western Hungary, with probably some Saxon blood in her veins. His three
brothers were dark like his father, but he and his sister were blondes.
He was born with a peculiar red mark on his right shoulder, directly
over the scapular. This mark was shaped like a forked stick. His father
had received a wound in the insurrection of '48, a few months before the
birth of him, the youngest son, and this birth-mark reproduced the shape
of the father's scar. Among Hungarians his father passed for a very
learned man. He spoke fluently German, French, and Latin (the language
used by Hungarians in common communication with other nationalities),
and took great pains to give his children an acquaintance with each of
these tongues. Their earliest playthings were French alphabet-blocks,
and the set which served as toys and tasks for each of the elder
brothers came at last to him as his legacy. The letters were formed by
the human figure in different attitudes,