g the beds of spinach, greedily answered to the call of the charmer,
and with ears upright trotted towards the basket to discover what might
be in it.

The gypsy woman caught its hind legs.

Mistress Borcsa screamed, Marcsa grunted, and the pig squealed loudest
of all.

"Kill it at once to stop its cries!" cried Sarvoelgyi. "What a horrible
noise over a pig!"

"Don't kill it! Don't make it squeal while I am listening," exclaimed
Borcsa in a terrified passion: then she ran back into the kitchen, and
stopped her ears lest she should hear them killing her favorite pig.

She came out again as soon as the squeals of her _protege_ had ceased,
and with uncontrollable fury took up a position before Sarvoelgyi. The
gypsy woman smilingly pointed to the murdered innocent.

Mistress Borcsa then said in a panting rage to Sarvoelgyi:

"Miser who gives one day, and takes back--a curse upon such as you!"

"Zounds! good-for-nothing!" bawled the righteous fellow. "How dare you
say such a thing to me?"

"From to-day I am no longer your servant," said the old woman, trembling
with passion. "Here is the cooking-spoon, here the pan: cook your own
dinner, for your wife knows less about it than you do. My husband lives
in the neighboring village: I left him in his young days because he beat
me twice a day; now I shall go back to the honest fellow, even if he
beat me thrice a day."

Mistress Borcsa was in reality not jesting, and to prove it she at once
gathered up her bed, brought out her trunks, piled all her possessions
onto a barrow, and wheeled them out without saying so much as "good
bye."

Sarvoelgyi tried to prevent this wholesale rebellion forcibly by seizing
Mistress Borcsa's arm to hold her back.

"You shall remain here: you cannot go away. You are engaged for a whole
year. You will not get a kreutzer if you go away."

But Mistress Borcsa proved that she was in earnest, as she forcibly tore
her arm from Sarvoelgyi's grasp.

"I don't want your money," she said, wheeling her barrow further. "What
you wish to keep back from my salary may remain for the
master's--coffin-nails."

"What, you cursed witch!" exclaimed Sarvoelgyi. "What did you dare to say
to me?"

Mistress Borcsa was already outside the gate. She thrust her head in
again, and said:

"I made a mistake. I ought to have said that the money you keep from me
may remain--to buy a rope."

Sarvoelgyi, enraged, ran to his room to fetch a stick, but before he c