After that Hanák had not the heart to go home, but sought comfort in the pot-house, where the village sages were already sitting in council together and discussing the problems of the Future.
CHAPTER X.
A LEADER OF THE PEOPLE.
The other rector, Mr. Thomas Bodza, had read a lot of things in the course of his life.
He had read the history of Themistocles who, with a handful of Greeks, converted millions of Persians into rubbish heaps; he had read of the exploits of the valiant Marahas, who, when one of their warriors flung his sandal into the air and uttered thrice the word: "Marha, Marha, Marha!" swept the Roman legions from the face of Pannonia; he had learnt from the Spanish historian all about Ferdinand VII., who chased the Moors from the Alhambra where they had held sway for hundreds of years; he had read of the Scythian Bertezena, who, starting in life as a simple smith had delivered his race from the grinding yoke of the Geougs;—and finally he had not only read but learnt by heart all the great works of our savants in which it is demonstrated with the most exact scholarship and the most inflexible logic, that the Greeks, the Marahas, the Spaniards, the Scythians, and, in fact, all the most famous nations of the earth have originated from a single powerful race which numbers among its chiefest branches, such noble nations as the Russians, the Poles, the Bohemians, and the Croats, &c., inasmuch as the languages of all these various nations are so crammed with original Slavonic words, that if these words were suddenly demanded back from them by their rightful owners, any sort of verbal intercourse amongst the nations in question would be henceforth impossible.
All this Thomas Bodza had read and crammed into his head. Once he had even written a dissertation in which, with astonishing profundity and ingenuity, he had demonstrated the striking resemblance and the identical significance of the Greek ον and the Slavonic tiszi, which dissertation was received with general applause in the local mutual improvement society where he recited it.
In his library were to be found all those learned tomes which do our dear native land the honour of only noticing her in order to disparage her, attributing inter alia a Slavonic origin to all our chief towns, and forcing upon us the crushing conviction that we Hungarians cannot even call a single water-course our own, inasmuch as all our rivers rise in other countries—certainly a most depressing, poverty-stricken state of things, especially as regards our cattle dealers and boatmen, who, of course, can do so little without water.
After long-continued scientific investigations, materially assisted by a vigorous imagination, Thomas Bodza had constructed a map of his own, in which the various countries appeared in a shape diverging essentially from that which they actually occupy, and indeed only the figure of the virgin Europa, and the outlines of the unchangeable water-courses made one suspect that it was a representation of the old world at all. Not only did the boundaries of the realm suffer strange permutations, but the classical termination "grad,"[5] unusual and unnatural as it seemed to all but the initiated, was tacked on pretty frequently to the names of purely Hungarian towns both small and great; and there was also noticeable this slight and fanciful deviation from the strict truth, to wit, that whereas cities of unappropriatable Asiatic origin like Debreczen, Kecskemet, Nagy-Köros, and others, appeared degraded into insignificant villages by being marked with tiny points, every little twopenny-halfpenny Slavonic village in the Carpathians was magnified into a cathedral city, or starred to represent a formidable fortress.
[5] The Slavonic word for "town," thus Constantinople is Tsargrad.