zen assembled in their church, to worship God, as they said. But no words of God were there, nor solemn organ-notes; wild voices announced approaching horrors, and the sainted roof resounded with strains ominous of strife. The town's-people were tranquil. Those amongst them who noticed that their neighbours' windows were lighted up, and who saw gloomy faces hurrying to the church, said to themselves, "To-day the Raitzen hold high festival;" and thought no more of it, but went their ways to bed. Towards midnight the alarm-bell sounded, the doors of the temple opened, and the nocturnal revel began. With wild howl the excited mob burst into the houses of their sleeping neighbours. It was as though they had some ancient and inveterate grudge to avenge, so fierce and bitter was the fury with which they murdered all whose windows showed no lights the token the Raitzen had adopted, lest by error they should assail each other's dwellings. In two hours the Magyar population of the town was exterminated, with the exception of a scanty few who escaped in carts and carriages. These, however, were pursued; and when the uproar in the town, the sounds of strife and lamentation, and the clang of bells, were hushed, cries of agony and despair were still heard issuing at in tervals from the adjacent country, as vehicles, stuck fast in the treacherous swamps, were overtaken, and the luckless fugitives ruthlessly butchered. At last these heart-rending sounds also ceased. Voices of complaint were no longer audible, but in their stead, in more than one quarter of the illuminated town, were heard music, and dancing, and merriment. It was long past midnight when a cart drove through the streets of St Thomas. In it sat a man wrapped in his cloak, marvelling greatly at the lights in the houses, and the sounds of festivity and joy. At his own housedoor he stopped his horse. To his great surprise, his dwelling also was lighted up, and within were sounds of music, a hum of voices, and noise of dancing feet. Astounded and anxious, he stepped silently to a window, and through it he beheld a crowd of well-known faces. The company, flushed with wine and excitement, sang and shouted, and drank out of his glasses, and danced madly round the room. They were all old acquaintances, and inhabitants of the town. Ignorant of the events of the night, the man thought he was dreaming. Presently his attention was attracted by the licentious garb and demeanour of a woman, who circulated amongst the guests with loud laugh and libertine gestures, sharing in and stimulating the orgies. At first, he * The name of Raitzen is synonymous with Serbs. "Arsenius Czernojewic, under Leopold I., transplanted a large colony of Serbs from the ancient Rascia to Hungary. Hence the name Razen, Raczen, Raitzen. "The Serbs first aimed the poniard at their German and Magyar neighbours. Isolated scenes of murder, perpetrated by the Serbs against the Magyars and Germans, who inhabit that district, (the Bacska, or country of Bacs, between the Danube and the Theiss,) led the way to a series of sanguinary atrocities, such as our age had hoped never to see repeated. The commencement of hostilities is due to the SclavoWallachian race; old, long-restrained hate, combined with an innate thirst for blood, marked the rising of the South Sclavonian races from the first as one of the bloodiest character, in which murder was both means and end. No revolution of modern times -the great French Revolution not excepted-is blackened with such horrible atrocities as this: the details may be found in the Serbian and Magyar journals; and one would fain have hoped that the accounts on both sides were exaggerated. Unhappily, such a hope is illusory; nor can the historian indulge it without falsifying the truth. Deeds have been perpetrated which call to mind the Hurons and Makis of the American forests. Like them, the Serbs were masters in the art of torture and murder; like them, they made their unhappy victims previously undergo all the dreadful steps of torment, prolonging the transition from life to death with a refinement of cruelty; like them, they vaunted the deeds of horror, and honoured their executioners as heroes. . . Such unheard-of atrocities inevitably called forth retaliation. Magyars and Germans became savages among savages."-SCHLESINGER, Pulsky's edition, i. 22-24. It could not discern who this woman was. Then he recognised her. was his own wife. "Hold!" he shouted, and strode into the room where these saturnalia were in progress. He knew not what to do or say; it were hard to find a word which should express the rage that possessed him. "Hold!" he thundered out, every fibre quivering with fury, "what do ye here?" The guests stood aghast at that apparition of wrath. The boldest started at sight of the man, as he stood amongst them, terrible and deadly pale. For a while none dared approach him. He went up to his wife, a dark-haired, black-eyed, redcheeked wanton, who stood as if turned to stone. He fixed his eyes upon hers with a deadly gaze. "On your knees!" The woman stirred not. "On your knees, wretch!" vociferated the husband, and struck her in the face, so that she fell to the ground. "Hold, dog!" was shouted on all sides. The Raitzen rushed forward, and the man was seized by twenty hands. He struggled against them, grasped the throat of one, and relaxed not his clutch, even when thrown down and trampled under foot, until he had choked his adversary to death. They bound his hands and thrust him into a corner. The Raitzen formed a circle about him. "What would ye of me?" he asked, the blood flowing from his mouth. "What would we? Look around you. See you not that all here are Raitzen?" replied a tall dark-browed Serb, scowling scornfully and cruelly at the sufferer. "And I a Magyar. What then?" "Ask thy neighbours. Hast thou not heard that to-day is our festival? The festival of the extermination of the Magyars. You are one: the last in the town. All the others are dead. As the last, you shall choose the manner of your death." "So you are the executioner, Basil?" "I? I am the chosen of my people." With indescribable loathing, the Magyar spat in his face. "Scoundrel!" yelled the insulted "Truly, thou art a cool fellow. But you had a daughter,—a fair and innocent child." George looked at his tormentor, and shuddered. "Lina, I think, was her name," continued the Serb, drawling out his words with a refinement of cruelty. "What-what mean you?" asked the trembling father. "A comely maiden, by my word. Fair to look upon, is she not?" "The devil seize thee! What next?" "So young and delicate, and yetsix husbands. Hard to choose. Your wife could not decide to which she should belong. I stepped in, and settled the matter. I married herto all six--" He burst into fiendish laughter. Mute and giddy with horror, the father raised himself from the ground. "I am sorry," continued the Serb, "that you were not here for the wedding." "May God's justice fall upon you!" shrieked the wretched father, stifling his tears. But the parent's heart overpowered the pride of the man. He fell with his face upon the ground, and wept-tears of blood. "Lift him up," said Basil, "that we may see him weep for the first time in his life. Weep a little, George; and you, sot, tune up your pipes, that he may have accompaniment to his tears." And thereupon the drunken band began to dance round their victim with shouts of laughter and scoffing gestures, striking and kicking him as they passed. Now, however, he wept no longer. He closed his eyes and kept silence, enduring their ill-treatment without sign or sound of complaint. "Away with him!" cried Basil. "Throw him into the garret, and put a sentry over him. To-day we have celebrated his daughter's wedding; to-morrow we will drink at his funeral. Good-night, friend George." He was dragged up to the garret, and locked in. Where they threw him, there he lay, motionless upon the floor, as though all sensation had departed from both body and soul, awaiting the hour of death, and rejoicing that it was near at hand. For a while the dancing and singing continued; then the Serbs departed to sleep, and all was still. His eyes were unvisited by slumber. Yet a little while, he thought to himself, and eternal repose will be mine. He lay with his senses thus benumbed, thinking neither of the past nor the future, when he heard a rustle at the garret window. Through the darkness he saw a white figure pass through the small opening, and grope its way towards him. Was it a dream? or a reality? The figure's steps were noiseless. But presently it spoke in a scarcely audible whisper. "Father! father!" it said. He looked up, seeking to discern the features of his visitor. She hurried to him, kissed him, and cut the ropes that bound his hands. "My child!" murmured George, and clasped his daughter's tottering knees. "My dear, my only child ! "Let us fly!" said the maiden, in faint and suffering tones. "The ladder is at the window. Quick, father-quick!" George clasped his panting child in his arms, and bore her through the opening in the garret roof, and down the ladder, resting her head upon his shoulder and covering her cold cheek with his kisses. Near the ladderfoot, he stumbled over something. "What is that? A spade. We will take it with us." "For a weapon!" said the father. VOL. LXIX.-NO. CCCCXXIII. Stay here! Keep close to the wall," said George to his daughter. He grasped the spade, and crept noiselessly to the corner of the house. The steps came nearer and nearer. George raised the spade. The Serb turned the corner, and-lay the next moment upon the ground, with his skull split. He had not time for a single cry. No George took the dead man's clothes and weapons, took his daughter in his arms, and left the town. The morning star glittered in the brightening sky. Towards daybreak, and without having exchanged a word, father and daughter reached the nearest village. George had many acquaintances there, and with one of them, he thought, he could leave his daughter. He found but a poor reception. where was he suffered to cross the threshold. None offered him so much as a crust of bread. All closed their doors, and implored him to depart, lest he should bring destruction on their heads. The villagers were neither hard-hearted nor cowardly; but they feared that if the Serbs of St Thomas heard of their sheltering a fugitive, they also would be murdered or plundered. With anguish in his soul, the wretched man again took his child in his arms, and resumed his journey. For six days he walked on, over stubble and fallow, through storm and cold by night and parching heat by day-his child, his beloved child, on his arm. He asked not what ailed her; and she uttered no complaint. On the sixth day the maiden died, of hunger, misery, and grief. The father felt his burthen heavier; the arms that clasped his neck slackened their hold, and the pale cheek that nestled on his shoulder was chill and cold! But the spires of Szegedin now glittered in the distance. George hurried on, and at last, exhausted by his speed, he reached at noonday the large and populous city. In front of it, on the vast plain, a great multitude was assembled: more than G twenty thousand souls were gathered together, listening to the words of a popular orator, exalted upon a scaffolding in their midst. George made his way into the throng; the speaker was relating the incredible atrocities of the Raitzen. Several of his hearers noticed the weary, wild-looking, travelstained man, carrying in his arms a pale girl with closed eyes, who stood amongst them like a fugitive from a mad-house. heart. "She is dead!" he repeated. The words died away upon his lips, and he fell, like one thunderstruck, headlong to the ground. This tragical incident raised to a climax the excitement of the multitude. "Revenge!-a bloody revenge!" thundered a voice; and the tumult that now arose was like the howling of the storm. "To arms! To arms! all who are "Whence come you?" they asked men!" was shouted on every side, him. "From St Thomas." "Ha! Up! up with him on the scaffold!" cried those who heard his reply. "A man is here from St Thomas. Up with him, and let him speak to the people! The crowd opened a passage, and George was hurried to the scaffold. When, from this elevation, his emaciated and ghastly countenance, furrowed by suffering and despair, his failing limbs, and the faded and ashy pale features of the child upon his shoulder, became visible to the assembled multitude, a deep shuddering murmur ran through its masses, like that the Platten Lake gives forth when tempest nears its shores. At sight and sound of the heaving throng, a hectic flush flamed upon George's cheek, an unwonted fire burned in his bosom; he felt the spirit of revenge descend upon his head like a forked and fiery tongue. Magyars!" he exclaimed in loud and manly tones, "I come from St Thomas, the sole survivor of all who there prayed to God in the Magyar tongue. My goods are plundered, my kinsmen slain. Have any of you friends there?-prepare your mourning, for of a surety they are dead. Of all I possessed I have saved but one treasure my unhappy child. Approach! ye that are fathers, think of your virgin daughters, and behold what they have made of mine!" As he spoke, he lifted his child from his shoulder; and then only did he perceive that she was dead. Until that moment, he had thought she was only faint and silent, as she had constantly been for six days past. "Dead!" shrieked the despairing man, and clasped the corpse to his and the people thronged through the streets and lanes of the city. "To arms!-to arms!' was re-echoed from house to house, and in an hour's time ten thousand furious men stood armed and equipped, and ready to set out for St Thomas. Then there got abroad a sullen apprehension, speedily succeeded by a fierce resolve. Some one chanced to say : "But what if, when we march away, the Raitzen rise up and murder our children?" The words passed from mouth to mouth. "They shall die!" exclaimed many voices. "Let them perish, as our brothers perished at St Thomas! They must die!" And with terrible ferocity the people turned against their own city, and like a mountain torrent, overpowering all restraint, poured into their neighbours' dwellings, and slew the Raitzen to the very last man. This occurred on the sixth day after the extermination of the Magyars at St Thomas. THE ROBBER-CAPTAIN. George took his dead child in his arms, carried her into the forest, dug a grave at the foot of a poplar tree, and laid her in it. He lacked the courage to throw clods upon her pale and beautiful countenance, but he plucked leaves and twigs from the bushes, laid them thickly over her, and then covered all with the black earth. When the grave was filled in, and whilst he was smoothing the green moss over the mound, anguish tore his heart; but, instead of soothing tears, the fire of hell gleamed in his eyes. Then he took out his knife, to cut his child's name on the bark of the tree which was to be her living monument. But when the letters were complete, there stood, graven by his own hand, the name of BASIL. For he thought no longer of his daughter, but of her murderer. And more terribly significant than a thousand curses and vows of vengeance was that name, graven in that hour and that place. George rose from the ground, and wandered forth into the forest. He had walked some distance, when a longing desire came over him once more to gaze upon his daughter's grave. He turned to seek it, but the trees were all alike: in vain he sought the one beneath which his child lay buried, and at last night overtook him in the very heart of the forest. Still he walked on, whither and wherefore he knew not. The wood grew thicker, and the night darker; the birds, startled at his footsteps, flew screaming from their perch. At last he stumbled over a tree-root, and fell. Why should he get up again? As well there as anywhere. He let his weary head sink upon the ground, whispered a "good night" to his child, and fell asleep, and dreamed of burning towns and scenes of slaughter. Towards midnight the neighing of a horse roused him from bis restless slumbers. Near at hand he saw a saddle-horse, snorting and pawing the ground. Behind some bushes he heard a woman's plaintive tone, and the harsher voice of a man, mingled at intervals with the prattle of a child. The man was a short spare figure, with flashing black eyes, long mustaches hanging down over his mouth, and black hair streaming on his shoulders. Energy was the charac teristic of his features, and the sinews of his frame were like cords of steel. In his arms he held a child, three or four years old. The child called him father, and clasped him affectionately with its little hands. A woman was also there, sobbing passionately, and wiping the tears from her eyes. "Canst thou pray, my son?" said the man, seating the child upon his knee. "Surely he can," the woman answered; "morning and evening he repeats his prayer.' "Grow up a good man, my sonnot such a one as thy father. In another year put him to school, that he may learn something good." "That will I, though it were to cost me my last florin! When "And take him far hence! he is older, never tell him what his father was. Conceal my name from him; never let him know that he is the son of Rosa Sandor the robber."* "Ask thy father, child, when he will again visit us.” "I know not, my son. For me the morning never dawns of which I can say, this day is mine. Here to-day, to-morrow fifty miles off; after tomorrow, perhaps under the turf." "Talk not thus! See, tears are in the child's eyes." "So is it, my son, and not otherwise. The robber has none to whom to pray, early and late, for protection to his life." "But you are no murderer, Sandor! You have no man's blood upon your hands!" "Seek not to palliate my offence, dear wench! Sooner or later, the gallows and the ravens will claim me." Again the woman began to sob; the child cried when it saw its mother Schlesinger describes Rosa Sandor as “a man about thirty-five years of age not very tall or stout, with fair hair, small mustaches and whiskers, and with nothing of the bandit in his appearance or demeanour," but mentions that he had a lieutenant of the popular bandit type, a broad-shouldered truculent personage with a formidable black beard, and long hair streaming on his shoulders. "A strange relation," he adds, "exists between the two men. The master was anxious, for reasons easy to conceive, that his person should not be generally known in the country; whilst the servant, on the contrary, had vanity enough to take pleasure in passing for the famous Rosa Sandor. All the portraits of the latter which are circulated throughout the country are faithful likenesses of the lieutenant, and hence the common erroneous notion of the Captain." |