his one was a
German. The next morning more drumming was heard in the market-place,
and the order was given that all who possessed Hungarian bank-notes
must give them up to have them burned. Those who refused would be shot
or hanged.

The poor widow ran weeping to her neighbor, and asked what she should
do. The whole sum he had given her lay in her drawer untouched. If it
were taken from her she and her child must beg or starve. Why had he
given her this money? Why had he changed her German notes if he knew
that this was going to happen?

"How could I know it?" shrieked Csanta; and, still screaming, he went
on to lament over himself. "If you are beggared, so am I--ten thousand
times more beggared than any one. I haven't a copper coin in the
house. I don't know how I can pay even for a bit of meat. I shall have
a hundred thousand bank-notes burned. I am ruined! I am a beggar!"

And he fell to cursing both Germans and Hungarians, until the widow
Belenyi implored him not to shriek so loud, else he would be heard,
and, God help us all! hanged.

"Let them hear, then! Let them hang me! I don't care. I shall go to
the market-place and tell them to their faces they are robbers, and if
they won't hang me I'll hang myself. I am only considering whether I
shall suspend myself from the pump-handle or from the steeple of the
tower."

The widow besought him, for Heaven's sake, not to do such a terrible
deed.

"And what's to become of me? Am I to go round with a hat and beg for a
penny? Here, these are my last halfpence."

He drew a few coins from his pocket, and began to weep piteously; his
tears flowed in streams. The poor woman tried her best to console him.
She begged him not to despair; the butcher and the baker knew him, and
would trust him. She was tempted to offer him a piece of twenty
groschen.

"Oh, you will soon see!" sobbed the old man. "Come to-morrow morning
early, and you will see me hanging from a hook in the passage. I
couldn't survive this!"

What could she do? The poor soul carried her Hungarian bank-notes to
the commander, and saw them consumed in the market-place.

Oh, it was a laughable joke! To this day when people talk of it their
eyes fill with tears.

For the widow, and many like her, there followed months and years of
grinding poverty. She had lost all the capital saved for her by her
father; there remained nothing but the house. The front rooms she let
as a shop, and in the back she lived an