e shot. I stopped them both."
Even as Mayor Stewart had winged his two birds with one ball had I hit my
two peregrines.

"We are now going to perform," said the gypsy captain. "Will you not
take seats on the platform, and hear us play?"

I did not know it at the time, but I heard afterwards that this was a
great compliment, and one rarely bestowed. The platform was small, and
we were very near our new friends. Scarcely had the performance begun
ere I perceived that, just as the gypsies in Russia had sung their best
in my honor, these artists were exerting themselves to the utmost, and,
all unheeding the audience, playing directly at me and into me. When any
_tour_ was deftly made the dark master nodded to me with gleaming eyes,
as if saying, "What do you think of _that_, now?" The Viennese laughed
for joy every time his glance met mine, and as I looked at the various
Lajoshes and Joshkas of the band, they blew, beat, or scraped with
redoubled fury, or sank into thrilling tenderness. Hurrah! here was
somebody to play to who knew gypsy and all the games thereof; for a very
little, even a word, reveals a great deal, and I must be a virtuoso, at
least by Romany, if not by art. It was with all the joy of success that
the first piece ended amid thunders of applause.

"That was not the _racoczy_," I said. "Yet it sounded like it."

"No," said the captain. "But _now_ you shall hear the _racoczy_ and the
_czardas_ as you never heard them before. For we can play that better
than any orchestra in Vienna. Truly, you will never forget us after
hearing it."

And then they played the _racoczy_, the national Hungarian favorite, of
gypsy composition, with heart and soul. As these men played for me,
inspired with their own music, feeling and enjoying it far more than the
audience, and all because they had got a gypsy gentleman to play to, I
appreciated what a _life_ that was to them, and what it should be; not
cold-blooded skill, aiming only at excellence or preexcellence and at
setting up the artist, but a fire and a joy, a self-forgetfulness which
whirls the soul away as the soul of the Moenad went with the stream adown
the mountains,--_Evoe Bacchus_! This feeling is deep in the heart of the
Hungarian gypsy; he plays it, he feels it in every air, he knows the rush
of the stream as it bounds onwards,--knows that it expresses his deepest
desire; and so he has given it words in a song which, to him who has the
key, is o