was accounted for. Each movement of the hand indicated, as if in that ancient room, with ivy curling at the windows, one of your American efficiency engineers had ridden workmen to perfection. "Three minutes to brush the teeth," the order read, "two minutes to wash hands," "one minute to wash face." "Hurry, Ilona"; "hurry, Boy." Always the bath must Always the bath must be just so many degrees, eighteen at the morning bath, twenty at the evening's. Always breakfast was the same, a sober meal without games unless you counted the butter quarrels, sly swift reaches to rob one another's butter pats. Oh, how I used to want an egg! But there was no egg on the schedule. At eight, lessons. Tick-tock, as regular as the clock, everything happened. Not a touch of kindergarten; always a little barrack of serious learning. There were four governesses, one English, one French, one German, and much later one Magyar, and tutors and professors coming in from the village. From eight to eleven lessons. At eleven we went to our mother for a quarter of an hour, said good morning, and watched her at her letters. Then Then we walked, decorous walking with a governess, each day in rotation a different one, speaking in a different language. When I was very little I had a language of my own, sounds invented to indicate this or that, and curious elders came to listen, as if some primeval savage from the days when speech was young was to be studied. I think it was Hilly-Willy, a Miss Hill from England who had come out to be the English governess, who converted me to language in which a listener was to be had, or it may have been Lalatai, Fräulein Stahl, who stayed

with us for twenty years. I was full of tales, and had to tell them. We walked in the garden, a stuffy garden. The perfume of the chestnut-trees was heavy, like sweet smoke; the roses were a jungle; and the tulips gaudy and huddled, like Ziganes at a fair. The hedge walls rose like the walls of a hothouse. Sometimes my mother would come, queenly in a white silk frock, and enter into long discussions with the gardener. The pleasanter part of the garden was down by the ruins of the old castle. Vines and upstart weeds rioted over the crumbling red pile, and as we walked by, I would tell my governess of my adventures, how the night before, when she was asleep, I had walked that path, and climbed on the ledges, and I was not alone in the ruins. All the Andrassys from old times were there. "It was moonlight, and I saw quite clearly. It was still, and I could hear everything." It did not matter; I could relate anything so long as I made no mistake in grammar and was faithful to the day's language. I could even boast. I could tell about my grandmother's father Count Kendeffy, who had been a famous Transylvanian patriot. Close by the ruins was the Andrassy mausoleum, shaded by the evergreens on the edge of the pond where we skated at Christmas. We could look through the door and see the statue of our Aunt Ilona, the Countess Bathyani, bent crying over the tombs of her father and mother, which the architect Zala had made, and the painting of the crucifixion by Munkácsy, who lived for months at a time and painted at Terebes. Munkácsy was a great favorite of my grandfather's, and the story goes that the visiting aristocracy used to twit

Count Andrassy on his plebeian friends, unbending as he did to mere painters and musicians.

went for a visit to our aunt Countess Bathyani at Ikervae without me. Tante Ilona smoked long cheroots.

"To be sure," the cultivated aristocrat would reply. To which my grandfather gravely replied:

"Ah, but do you recall a foreign minister in Rome when Raphael lived?"

§ 2

My mother's grandfather, Count Kendeffy, had not been buried in any mausoleum. They had made no mound for his grave, and there was no stone. "What need has he of a stone or a mound?" they had said. "The spot where he lies all men will know for a thousand years." It was a grand story then, and it is now, except that I doubt if a dozen old peasants know where to find the grave to-day.

Magyar I did not learn at all until after I was six. My mother's old friend Countess Dessewffy happened to be calling one day when the nurse brought me in from a walk.

"How are you, my child?" she said in Magyar. I hung my head and asked my mother in English what she had said. A scene took place for the countess was a D. A. R. of our own Revolution of 1848. She was shocked. She was outraged. What did my mother mean letting an Andrassy child grow up without its native tongue? Kossuth would turn in his grave. When next the patriot came to see us I had a Magyar tongue. Others related to her, however, that my first words of fluent Magyar had been, loud and informing, "Akarok hamis lenni" ("I want to be naughty"). When I was five, Ilona and Boy

and looked on cigarettes as a decadent habit.

It was lonely in the nursery on the Margaret Embankment, our Budapest address. The house was singularly quiet. Then my father came up to me.

"What do you think, Katinka? Mother has a new doll for a present." A nurse led me into an empty room and let me look into the cradle at a little creature with black, black hair; odd, for Klara, later, was very fair. I was ablaze with excitement. "No," said the nurse; "you can't go rushing to your mother. She has hurt her leg. The stork thrust at her."

"What stork?”

"The stork that brought the doll.” "Where?"

"In the hall." I rushed out. I could almost see it.

"No, it has just gone," said the nurse, pointing down the corridor. What an elaborate tale! When I was fetched back to town, I scrambled on a table, so the legend runs, and shouted: "I tell you a big news. A child is born. Now I will tell you how it happened. A stork came." And Boy rushed out of the room and broke her tooth-brush between her teeth in her joy. The last child was a girl, too. No one told us, but we knew that to be a boy was different and more exciting. We were not altogether sure that we were really only girls. We had heard at our catechism lesson about Adam and his rib, and how Eve was made of it. Out in the garden we consulted. We counted our own ribs. We counted

one another's. "One, two, three, four, five, six; six, not seven." I had only six ribs, and was a boy. I was proud. I wrote "Julius Andrassy" on all my copy-books. "I am Julius and a boy," I explained to all who would listen to me, and did not answer when Lalatai said, "Come, Katinka."

One summer when our cousins Paul and Anna Almassy came to visit us at Terebes we invented a game suited to the fifteenth century. Under an oath of secrecy, we told them about the prisoner in the dungeon who had lived for years and years in darkness and on crusts. What his crime was we did not explain. To show him we were willing, not in order that they might be kind to him, but that they should believe. We smuggled a nursemaid confederate into a dark and littleused room in the cellar, where truly there was no light, and the cobwebs were dark and dusty with the years. We furnished her with a stool to cower on, man's trousers and blouse, and a skein of gray beard that would never have stood the light of day. Our cousins were terrified. We were almost frightened ourselves when the prisoner of Terebes, silent for twenty years, made guttural male sounds as we thrust some crusts through the door. For two months the game went on, lending a secret horror to all we did by day, accounting for whispers aside, and threats to lock one another in. Then one day, perhaps because the nursemaid was tired of her rôle, we told our cousins, and mystery was dead.

We began to play at war with the peasant children, who were never allowed in the garden. They were Slovak children, and as it was strictly denied us to learn Slovak, lest we hear

"something not good for you or cursing," we could only stare at one another. When an adventurous barefoot broke through the hedges, we would shout, "The enemy! the enemy!" and with switches and pebbles chase him away and take attitudes as defenders of a city. Peasants were creatures apart, and it was not only that we did not know their language. Ilona refused to call the forest master "Mister."

"Why should I call him that?" she asked. "He is not a gentleman.' The forest master was responsible for seventy-five thousand acres.

"Any man is a gentleman who does his duty." Ilona and my mother protested. My father repeated his definition.

"But not the stable-boys," Ilona insisted. She held out for that. But I did not see why not the stable-boys. There were forty of them at Terebes.

In

There was routine in the year as well as in the day. In summer and autumn we were at Toke-Terebes. August and September we went to Dubrin, a shooting-place in Transylvania, thirty thousand acres of virgin forest. One often had to cut roads to travel there. The shooting-box was a small house. We saw our parents oftener, though always there were shooting parties, and the shouts of men off on stag-hunts broke in on the quiet of lessons always, everywhere, six hours a day of lessons. There was never a chance to want to learn anything, to be curious, to choose for oneself; always there were lessons, something to strain at. There were other rigors, too. A doctor in Austria had proclaimed the miracle of cold water, and every day we were sent to bathe in an icy mountain pool. Some

other prophet had said that if children were never dressed warmly, they would be spared colds in later life. We wore socks and were never allowed to wear gloves, and our dresses were often thin under our little red coats. My sisters have swollen knuckles still in winter. Perhaps our training was too Spartan. We were taught that to say "I am cold" was quite like saying "I am a coward," and when visitors were shocked at seeing four little girls all violet in the wind, and asked, "Are n't you cold?" we replied with one voice, "We are not cold children." We were allowed one cover on our beds and no pillows, a rule I follow with my own children. Our food was very simple. There was never wine or salad, and for years we had tapioca pudding every night for dinner. When Klara was five there was the famous tapioca strike. We went, all four of us, and said that we could not ever eat another spoonful of tapioca pudding. We held our breath. "Well, you shall have something else," said my mother.

We were at Dubrin for my seventh birthday. Early in the morning some adult said in a sprightly fashion: "So now you are in your eighth year. After seven one is quite grown up." I stole away, no longer happy at the prospect of a picnic under the pines. I crawled under my bed to think. So all my youth was gone. I began to cry. It is hard to be old. No one says any more: "She is very little. You must excuse her." People would now expect always lessons perfect, all responsibilities filled. My cheeks were hot, and my sleeves wet. I think I slept. Youth goes before one knows it.

It was that same year that some

thing so terrible happened at Dubrin that no one could talk of it afterward; but I never forgot. I can hear the screams and often and often as a child I would lie thinking of it, conjuring up the screams and saying to myself, "It is not clear why such a thing could happen." One of our game wardens, I think you would call him, was killed by poachers. He was a guard that my father and my grandfather before him had been very fond of. I think he was more troubled than my father that a band of poachers were known to be ranging the forest. One day there had come to him an anonymous letter hinting that if he went to a certain place in the forest he would catch the poachers. When he did not come back, a search was made, and it was his body that they found. Our shooting-box was so small that even a little child was aware that horrible things were happening. The hunt for the murderers started. The gendarmerie were called in from their headquarters and stopped all who passed on the road. Some miles away they halted a carriage in which rode an old man and his two sons, well known peasants thereabouts. The posse were about to let the carriage pass when they saw that the old man was dead. Our guard had killed him, and the brothers were seeking to escape with the corpse lest his death rouse suspicion. And then the police discovered that one of the brothers was wounded, that he was riding along propping his old father. He died quickly, and so the police came to us with two dead men and the younger son. There were three small shooting-boxes for guests near the house. The children were called to the nursery. We could see nothing, but we knew every

thing that was happening, and from one of the visitors' cottages, where the police were questioning the boy about the band of poachers, they wanted to know everything, came screams. The police were peasants, like their victim. They had all grown up together, and now they were putting thumb-screws on him. Some one had stolen the property of the feudal lord, stags from the miles of virgin forest, and it was law that our guard could kill them. There was darkness and terror in the nursery. Everywhere the police do awful things. Then the screams stopped. My father, white-faced and with sweat on his brow, had gone to them. And the boy had made no sound in his presence, but had risen and inclined his head before the master of Dubrin. The police were sent away, protesting. They had only followed the custom of the country. Was the property not Count Andrassy's? The names of the other poachers, the names of all who were at the murder, they insisted upon having. It was something to think about through all the rest of my childhood, and I always came back to the same question. Why did our guard care so much about protecting my father's property, and why had he the right to kill the boy's brother and father and not to be called a murderer?

§3

The constant emotion of my childhood was one of being pent. We must walk. We must not kick up our heels and run as we walked. My pleasures were lonely and secret. I remember once in the garden, a black night with only the glimmer of a new moon through the chestnut-boughs, I had a

vision. Bocskay, our Hungarian hero, mounted on a charger and behind him a flutter of ghostly followers, was there on the garden path. I had been thinking of him for weeks and weeks. He said to me that his work was unfinished on earth and that he could no more do it. It is not given to a dead soul to do work on earth except in a living body. I could see nothing more. Something passed into me. My heart pounded as I fell on the grass in the dew. Of all the world, the dead soul of Bocskay had come into me to live and do his deeds. I could not have been more than ten. One can never be sure, but I think I had never heard a word of the transmigration of souls. For a year I tried often to be alone, and when I was alone I waited for the soul of Bocskay to tell me in dreams what I was to do. Once before I had had a sacred secret. In the night I had crept from the nursery into the garden with a peach pit. I planted it deep, and then walked round and round, inventing an abracadabra: "As the peach-tree grows, let me grow, too, into a hero. I will write down things. I will make glorious deeds." The next day I wrote myself a letter, describing the planting of the peach pit and the great things that were to come of it, and when no one was looking, I would read the letter that I had written to myself. Some one saw me. The letter was taken to my mother, and I was punished. Always I was being punished. Sometimes for being saucy to the governess; for saying, "I will do this" or "I will do that"; or for throwing something when one of them teased me. The governess would run to my mother. In dealing with her children and their governesses, the Countess Andrassy