ire issues from a sort of wooden cabin where several human
beings breathe, eat, sleep, are born and die, sometimes without hardly
ever having set foot upon the land. Pots of geranium or begonia give
a bit of bright color to the dingy surroundings; and the boats travel
slowly along the river, impelled by enormous oars, which throw long
shadows upon the water.

It was this motionless barge that Marsa was now regarding.

The hot sun, falling upon the boat, made its brown, wet sides sparkle
like the brilliant wings of some gigantic scarabee; and, upon the
patched, scorched deck, six or seven half-naked, sunburned children,
boys and girls, played at the feet of a bundle of rags and brown flesh,
which was a woman, a young woman, but prematurely old and wasted, who
was nursing a little baby.

A little farther off, two men-one tough and strong, a man of thirty,
whom toil had made forty, the other old, wrinkled, white-haired and
with skin like leather, father and grandfather, doubtless, of the little
brats beyond--were eating bread and cheese, and drinking, turn by turn,
out of a bottle of wine, which they swallowed in gulps. The halt was a
rest to these poor people.

As Marsa watched them, she seemed to perceive in these wanderers of the
river, as in a vision, those other wanderers of the Hungarian desert,
her ancestors, the Tzigani, camped in the puszta, the boundless plain,
crouched down in the long grass beneath the shade of the bushes, and
playing their beautiful national airs. She saw the distant fires of the
bivouac of those unknown Tzigani whose daughter she was; she seemed to
breathe again the air of that country she had seen but once, when upon a
mournful pilgrimage; and, in the presence of that poor bargeman's wife,
with her skin tanned by the sun, she thought of her dead, her cherished
dead, Tisza.

Tisza! To the gipsy had doubtless been given the name of the river on
the banks of which she had been born. They called the mother Tisza, in
Hungary, as in Paris they called the daughter the Tzigana. And Marsa was
proud of her nickname; she loved these Tzigani, whose blood flowed in
her veins; sons of India, perhaps, who had descended to the valley
of the Danube, and who for centuries had lived free in the open air,
electing their chiefs, and having a king appointed by the Palatine--a
king, who commanding beggars, bore, nevertheless, the name of
Magnificent; indestructible tribes, itinerant republics, musicians
play