PRETTY MICHAL.
CHAPTER I.
Wherein is shown how sagely the Rev. Master Fröhlich brought up his motherless daughter, pretty Michal.
In the days when the Turkish Sultan ruled in Hungary as far as Ersekujvar and Eger, the German Kaiser from Eger to the Zips country, and George Rakoczy, Prince of Transylvania, from Zips to the Szeklerland—all three of whom were perpetually fighting among themselves, sometimes two against one and sometimes all together indiscriminately, so that the inhabitants had a very lively time of it—in those days (somewhere about 1650) the learned and reverend Master David Fröhlich was the pride of the Keszmár Lyceum and Professor of Mathematics and Astronomy there. Master Fröhlich knew everything which could be reasonably expected of a man. He knew how to calculate solar and lunar eclipses. He knew how to take the old town-clock to pieces when it got out of order and put it together again. He could fix the weather for a whole year beforehand. He understood the aureus calculus and could cast a horoscope with any man living. He knew by heart which trades could be carried on best in each of the twelve months. He had at his fingers' ends the arcana and secret properties of all herbs and plants, could explain sympathies and antipathies, nay, he could be implicitly trusted in the manufacture of amulets.
But his most difficult science was that of which we are now about to speak.
He had one beautiful daughter whom he had brought up without the help of a mother, and that, surely, is a feat of which any man might be proud! His wife had died on the very day on which she had given birth to the child, and the widower had forthwith steadily set before himself the problem of educating the girl without the slightest female intervention.
The way in which he managed by artificial contrivances to find a substitute for mother's milk was a miracle of itself; but even that was as nothing compared with the masterly system of education which he himself invented and applied, in order to make his daughter grow up a discreet and modest maiden, despite the grievous want of maternal supervision. For he would neither marry again, nor trust his daughter to female nurses and servants, nor even admit any of his own kinswomen into the house.
He inaugurated his system at her very baptism, by giving his daughter the name of Michal. At first hearing, everyone, of course, takes this for a man's name, never suspecting that a damsel lurks behind it; perhaps only one among a thousand even knows that it is a girl's name after all. Was not one of the wives of King David called Michal?—she, I mean, who laughed when she saw the great King dancing in the street. So the reverend and learned gentleman christened his little daughter Michal, arguing that the Evil One would not so lightly venture to tackle a name with such a masculine ring about it.