of Franzfeld and those of Zrepaja, the neighbouring
Serbian village, some miles away; but, as the inhabitants of Franzfeld
have now been gathered into Yugoslavia, it is not without interest if
we see what sort of a life they have led. The tale of how these
Lutherans from Wuertemberg laid out and constructed and painted their
village, with all the tremendously broad, tremendously straight roads
running parallel and at right angles to each other, with the
church--whose decorations are a few stars on the ceiling--the pastor's
house and the lawyer's and the town hall and other important houses
standing round a square of mulberry trees in the middle of the
place--the tale of all this is told in as deliciously matter-of-fact a
manner as _Robinson Crusoe_. The picturesque, as in that book,
startles us now and then, with a vivid scene--until 1848, we are told,
at the arrival of a staff-officer or of a general, every bell in the
place had to be set ringing and gunpowder had to be fired off. One
finds oneself revelling in the minuteness of the descriptions, one
follows happily or sadly the fortunes of Ruppenthal and Kopp and
Morgenstern. Everything is true, for the compilers of the book have
felt, like Defoe, that "this supplying a story by invention is
certainly a most scandalous crime." We are given all the names of
those who at the beginning occupied the ninety-nine houses--the
hundredth being used as an inn--with their place of origin, the
numbers of their male and female dependants, and by what means they
had hitherto earned their bread. Many houses have been added since
that time. Among all the Germans, house No. 79 was occupied by George
Siraky, a Hungarian who had been a peasant. Ten years afterwards
another list is made and Siraky still disposes of the same twenty-four
"yoke"[35] of plough-land, ten of meadow and one of garden, which he
had originally been given, whereas some of the others had increased or
diminished their holdings. Then we lose sight of him, and his name
does not become one of those which reappears in succeeding
generations. Of course, the colony was established on a military
basis; an officer, usually a lieutenant, with one or more
non-commissioned officers, was stationed there, as the representative
of a commandant who presided over several villages. The resident
officer was supposed to maintain law and order, to see to it that the
people sowed their land at the right season, and to inform the
comman