His reverence's luggage was not bulky; it consisted of a plain wooden box, a bundle of bed-clothes, two walking-sticks, and some pipes tied together with string. As they passed through the various villages the sacristan was often chaffed by the inhabitants.
"Well," they called out to him, "couldn't you find a better conveyance than that for your new priest?"
Whereupon the sacristan tried to justify his fellow-villagers by saying with a contemptuous look at the luggage in the cart:
"It's good enough, I'm sure. Why, a calf a month old could draw those things."
But if he had not brought much with him in the way of worldly goods, János Bélyi did not find much either in his new parish, which appeared to be going to wreck and ruin. The relations of the dead priest had taken away every stick they could lay hands on, and had only left a dog, his favorite. It was a dog such as one sees every day, as far as his shape and coat were concerned, but he was now in a very unpleasant position. After midday he began to wander from house to house in the village, slinking into the kitchens; for his master had been in the habit of dining every day with one or other of his parishioners, and always took his dog with him.
The dog's name was Vistula, but his master need not have gone so far to find the name of a river, when the Bjela Voda flowed right through the meadows outside the village. (The Hungarian peasants generally give their dogs the name of a river, thinking it prevents hydrophobia.) The dog had already begun to feel that he and the priest together had been better received than he alone, though, until now, he had always imagined, with his canine philosophy, that his master had in reality been eating more than his share of the food. But now he saw the difference, for he was driven away from the houses where he had once been an honored guest. So altogether he was in a very miserable, lean condition when the new priest arrived. The sacristan had shown him his new home, with its four bare walls, its garden overgrown with weeds, its empty stable and fowl-house. The poor young man smiled.
"And is that all mine?" he asked.
"All of it, everything you see here," was the answer, "and this dog too."
"Whose dog is it?"
"It belonged to the poor dead priest, God rest his soul. We wanted to kill the poor beast, but no one dares to, for they say that the spirit of his old master would come back and haunt us."