that way. I must be
very careful, however, not to awake his suspicion.

Midnight.--I have had a long talk with the Count. I asked him a few
questions on Transylvania history, and he warmed up to the subject
wonderfully. In his speaking of things and people, and especially of
battles, he spoke as if he had been present at them all. This he
afterwards explained by saying that to a Boyar the pride of his house
and name is his own pride, that their glory is his glory, that their
fate is his fate. Whenever he spoke of his house he always said "we",
and spoke almost in the plural, like a king speaking. I wish I could
put down all he said exactly as he said it, for to me it was most
fascinating. It seemed to have in it a whole history of the country.
He grew excited as he spoke, and walked about the room pulling his
great white moustache and grasping anything on which he laid his hands
as though he would crush it by main strength. One thing he said which
I shall put down as nearly as I can, for it tells in its way the story
of his race.

"We Szekelys have a right to be proud, for in our veins flows the
blood of many brave races who fought as the lion fights, for lordship.
Here, in the whirlpool of European races, the Ugric tribe bore down
from Iceland the fighting spirit which Thor and Wodin gave them, which
their Berserkers displayed to such fell intent on the seaboards of
Europe, aye, and of Asia and Africa too, till the peoples thought that
the werewolves themselves had come. Here, too, when they came, they
found the Huns, whose warlike fury had swept the earth like a living
flame, till the dying peoples held that in their veins ran the blood
of those old witches, who, expelled from Scythia had mated with the
devils in the desert. Fools, fools! What devil or what witch was
ever so great as Attila, whose blood is in these veins?" He held up
his arms. "Is it a wonder that we were a conquering race, that we
were proud, that when the Magyar, the Lombard, the Avar, the Bulgar,
or the Turk poured his thousands on our frontiers, we drove them back?
Is it strange that when Arpad and his legions swept through the
Hungarian fatherland he found us here when he reached the frontier,
that the Honfoglalas was completed there? And when the Hungarian
flood swept eastward, the Szekelys were claimed as kindred by the
victorious Magyars, and to us for centuries was trusted the guarding
of the frontier of Turkeyland. Aye, a