to gaze upon the
scene. In the middle of the room there was hanging from the ceiling a
heavy chandelier with twelve branches, and on it was swaying the host
himself.

What a cursed foolery is a dream! The host was actually sitting there
vis-a-vis with the lawyer, at the other end of the long table; for
Mistress Boris had so laid the places. And as the magistrate's place
remained empty, host and guest sat so far apart that the one was
incapable of helping the other.

At last the door opened, with such a delicate creaking that the lawyer
thought somebody was ringing to be admitted:--It was Mistress Boris
bringing in the soup.

The lawyer was determined to make some sacrifice, in order to maintain
the dignity of the "legale testimonium," by dining a second time. He
thought himself capable of this heroic deed.

He was deceived.

There is a peculiarity of the Magyar which has not yet been the subject
of song: his stomach will not stand certain things.

This a stranger cannot understand: it is a "specificum."

When Voeroesmarty sang that "in the great world outside there is no place
for thee,"[37] he found it unnecessary to add the reason for that, which
every man knows without his telling them:--"in every land abroad they
cook with butter."

[Footnote 37: From the celebrated Szozat (appeal) calling on the
Hungarian to be true to his fatherland.]

A Magyar stomach detests what is buttery. He becomes melancholy and
sickly from it; he runs away from the very mention of it, and if some
sly housekeeper deceitfully gives him buttery things to eat, all his
life long he considers that as an attempt upon his life, and will never
again sit down to such a poison-mixer's table.

You may place him where you like abroad, still he will long to return
from the cursed butter-smelling world, and if he cannot he grows thin
and fades away: and like the giraffe in the European climate, he cannot
reproduce his kind in a foreign land. Roughly speaking, all his
neighbors cook with butter, oil and dripping: and "be harsh or kind, the
hand of fate, here thou must live, here die."[38]

[Footnote 38: Also from the "Szozat."]

The lawyer was a true Magyar of the first water. And when he perceived
that the crab soup was made with butter, he put down his spoon beside
his plate and said he could not eat crabs. Since he had learned that the
crab was nought else but a beetle living in water, and since a company
had been formed in Germany for