manner that no one,
unless he had had it explained could understand it.

The magistrate was quite enraptured by the simple instrument; he would
never have believed that anyone could play it with such masterly skill.

"Tell me," he asked her ladyship, not being able any longer to conceal
his astonishment, "where you learned to play this instrument."

At these words her ladyship broke into such a fit of laughter, that, if
she had not suddenly steadied herself with her feet against the
czimbalom stand, she would have fallen over. As it was, her hair being,
according to the fashion of the day, coiled up "a la Giraffe" round a
high comb, and the comb falling from her head, her two tresses of raven
hair fell waving over her shoulders to the floor.

At this the young lady discontinued laughing, and not succeeding at all
in her efforts to place her dishevelled hair around the comb again,
suddenly twisted it together on her head and fastened it with a spindle
she snatched from the spinning wheel.

Then to recover her previous high spirits, she again took up the
czimbalom sticks, and began to play some quiet melody on the instrument.

It was no song, no variations on well-known airs; it was some marvellous
reverie; a frameless picture, a landscape without horizon. A plaint, in
a voice rather playful over something serious that is long past, and
that can never come back again, avowed to no one by word of mouth, only
handed down from generation to generation on the resounding strings--the
song of the beggar who denies that he has ever been king:--the song of
the wanderer, who denies that he ever had a home and yet remembers it,
and the pain of the recollection is heard in the song. No one knows or
understands, perhaps not even the player, who merely divines it and
meditates thereon. It is the desert wind, of which no one knows whence
it comes and whither it goes; the driving cloud, of which no one knows
whence it arose, and whither it disappears. A homeless, unsubstantial,
immaterial bitterness ... a flowerless, echoless, roadless desert ...
full of mirages.

The magistrate would have listened till evening, no matter what became
of the neighbor's dinner, if Topandy had not interrupted him with the
sceptical remark that this lengthened steel wire has far more soul than
a certain two-footed creature, who affirms that he was the image of God.

And thus he again drew the attention of the worthy gentleman to the fact
that he wa