Bitter were the sounds of weeping and lamentation in the churchyard of Kezdi-Vasarhely—the cry of the Szekely women rose to heaven.
The old man at the crypt-door asked, in a feeble voice, the cause of the weeping.
"Szekely-land is lost!" they cried; "your son and your grandsons have fallen on the field with their leader, and Gabor Aron; and all their cannon is taken!"
The old man raised his hands and sightless eyes to heaven. "My God!" he exclaimed, and, sinking to the earth, he ceased to be blind; for the light of eternity had risen on his spirit.
The old man was dead.
The Szekely women surrounded the body with deep reverence, and bore it in their arms into the town.
The cripple followed slowly on his crutches, repeating bitterly to himself, "Why could not I have been there too? why could not I have fallen among them?"
In all Kezdi-Vasarhely there was not a man to be seen; the brave had fallen, the deserters had been turned away, and the last man they were now placing in his coffin, and he was an old man past eighty, and blind.
Only women and children now remained—widows and orphans—who wept bitterly round the old man's bier, but not for the dead.