In due course, both host and guests retired. The farmer, as soon as he was between the sheets, lit a massive long-stemmed pipe, and began to smoke, keeping his eye upon Duránczy.
The moonlight was streaming in upon the Major's pillow. It looked weird. The farmer watched Duránczy as he lay prostrate—watched and watched until he himself dozed off into an involuntary slumber.
Presently he was awoke by a noise. In the moonlight he perceived a figure, robed in a night-shirt. Ah! the Major, who seemed to be gazing around him with an air of mysterious inquiry. Then, step by step, with great circumspection, he advanced towards the farmer's bedside. Pozdordy held his breath. "Yes," he said to himself, "this man is a lunar somnambulist!"
Upon tiptoe the figure now went nearer and nearer to the farmer's couch. Pozdordy, in breathless expectation, grasped his heavy long-stemmed pipe—the only weapon of self-defence within arm's length—and just as the somnambulist was reaching towards an antique and richly inlaid sword, suspended high up against the wall, he dealt him a blow, so terrific as to produce a howl from the apparition. The farmer leaped out of bed, and, to protect his own life, was proceeding to half-strangle the sleepwalker, when, to his astonishment, he saw that it was not the Major.
"Who are you?" he exclaimed.
There was no answer. The farmer looked towards the Major's bed—there, in the moonlight, lay the warrior, who was just beginning to be roused from sleep by the noise of the scuffle, and who dreamily exclaimed, "What the devil?"
Pozdordy released his hold of the neck of this unknown man, who hastily escaped from the room; and the report goes that Mogyorôdy travelled home at 2 A.M. in his night-shirt. Anyhow, after hiding under the Major's bed in order to make him out to be a somnambulist, he never again dared to put his nose into Pozdordy's household; and the gallant soldier is to-day in peaceful possession of the beautiful Etelka.
Printed by Balantyne, Hanson & Co.
London & Edinburgh
Transcriber's Note: Many of the Hungarian titles listed in the Introduction were misspelled. "Estílapok" was changed to "Esti Lapok", "A Magyar Nábob" was changed to "Egy Magyar Nábob", "A Kőszivü Ember Fiaa" was changed to "A Kőszívű Ember Fiai", "A Szerelem Bolondja" was changed to "Szerelem Bolondjai", "A Névtelen Vár" was changed to "Névtelen Vár", "Bálványvárak" was changed to "Bálványosvár", "A Fekete Gyémántok" was changed to "Fekete Gyémántok", "A Jővé Század Regéje" was changed to "A Jövő Század Regénye", and "Az Uj Földes Ur" was changed to "Az Új Földesúr".