"Wring his neck! Why they drank eternal friendship together!"
"Well, it is not my business. Get me some more wine, but better stuff than this vinegar. I shall have to come out with another old saying, 'The fish is unhappy in the third water,' for the third water should be wine."
"That's a double insult to call my wine—water."
"Never mind," said the herdsman, "just get me a sealed bottle!"
Now it was the undoing of Sándor Decsi that he asked for a sealed bottle, one brought from the town, sealed with green wax, with a pink or blue label pasted on one side, covered with golden letters. Such wine is only fit for gentlefolk, or perhaps for people in the Emperor's pay!
Klári's heart beat loud and fast as she went into the cellar to fetch a bottle of this gentlefolk's wine.
For, suddenly, the girl remembered about a gipsy woman, who had once told her fortune for some old clothes, and, out of pure gratitude, had said this to her as well, "Should your lover's heart grow cold, my dear, and you wish to make it flame again, that is easily managed, give him wine mixed with lemon juice, and drop a bit of this root called 'fat mannikin' into it. Then his love will blaze up again, till he would break down walls to reach you!"
It flashed across the girl's mind that now was the very moment to test the charm, and the roots, stumpy and black, like little round-headed, fat-legged mannikins, were lying safe in a drawer of her chest. In the olden days much was believed of this magic plant, how it shrieked when pulled from the ground, and that those who heard it died. How, at last, they took dogs to uproot it, tying them to it by the tail! How Circe bewitched Ulysses and his comrades with it. The chemist, who has another use for it, calls it "atropa mandragora." But how could the girl know that it was poisonous?