tle world and brought the existence of God
nearer to their comprehension.

Slowly the procession wound its way down the village street. Pater
Bonifacius had intoned the opening orisons of the Litany:

"Kyrie eleison!"

And men and women chanted the response in that quaintly harsh tone which
the Magyar language assumes when it is sung. The brilliant sunlight
played on the smooth hair of the girls, the golds, the browns and the
blacks, and threw sharp glints on the fluttering ribbons of many colours
which a light autumn breeze was causing to dance gaily and restlessly.
The whole village was hushed save for the Litany, the clinking of the
metal chains as the choir-boys swung the censers and the frou-frou of
hundreds of starched petticoats--superposed, brushing one against the
other with a ceaseless movement which produced a riot of brilliant
colouring.

Soon the main road was reached, and now the vast immensity of the plain
lay in front and all round--all the more vast and immense now it seemed,
since not even the nodding plumes of maize or tall, stately sunflowers
veiled the mystery of that low-lying horizon far away.

Nothing around now, save that group of willow trees by the bank of the
turbulent Maros--nothing except the stubble--stumps of maize and pumpkin
and hemp, and rigid lines of broken-down stems of sunflowers, with
drooping, dead leaves, and brown life still oozing out of the torn
stems.

And in the immensity, the sweet, many-toned sounds of summer--the call
of birds, the quiver of growing things, the trembling of ripening
corn--has yielded to the sad tune of autumn--a tune made up of the
hushed sighs of dying nature, as she sinks slowly and peacefully into
her coming winter's sleep. The swallows and the storks have gone away
long ago. They know that in this land of excessive heat and winter
rigours, frost and snow tread hard on the heels of a warm, autumnal day.
Only a flight of rooks breaks the even line of the sky; their cawing
alone makes at times a weird accompaniment to the chanting of the
Litany. And the Maros--no longer sluggish--now sends her swollen waters
with a dull, rumbling sound westward to the arms of the mother stream.

Silence and emptiness!

Nothing except the sky, with its unending panorama of ever-varying
clouds, and its infinite, boundless, mysterious horizon, which enfolds
the world of the plains in a limitless embrace. Nothing except the
stubble and the sky, and far, very far a