I stood in front of the cashier’s little glass cage, leaning my elbows on the cool marble slab. There were only a few people coming and going in the big offices of the bank; a few servant girls sat about with their deposit-books in their hands. “How’s business in these days?” I asked the cashier as he pushed my money over the counter. “We have never been like this before. War-time was a perfect golden age in comparison.” He leant toward me and spoke in a whisper. “The Jews are exploiting the country and the Government shamelessly. The salary of a minister used to be twelve thousand crowns. The ministers of the popular Government have allotted themselves two hundred thousand and have had it paid out for a year in advance. For overtime, they take one hundred and sixty crowns an hour. The number of Ministers and Government delegates increases every day. There are forty Secretaries of State running about Budapest. Every radical journalist wants to be at least a Secretary of State. Treasury notes are printed as fast as posters. It is said that the popular Government has spent three milliards in a month—twice as much as the most expensive month of the war. This peace is an expensive thing, and one can’t say that the republic is exactly cheap. We are racing towards bankruptcy. Many people are taking their money to Switzerland....” “What I possess shall remain here. If the country is ruined, we Hungarians will be ruined with it, at any rate.” “It is wise to take precautions however,” the cashier said. “It is rumoured that all gold and silver is to be commandeered.” On my way home his last words kept coming to my mind. Among our old family papers there is a little scrap of a document dated 1848, addressed to my grandfather, Charles Tormay; it is a receipt for the silver he had delivered to the mint to cover the issue of Kossuth’s banknotes. My father once told me how on a certain day all the silver was heaped up on the dining-room table. He was a little boy at the time, and asked how he would be able to stir the sugar in his coffee if all the spoons were taken away? “With a wooden spoon,” his mother said. My father could not bear the idea of that, so he hung about the silver till he managed to steal a little spoon. Everything else was melted down, and that little spoon is the only thing that remains of our old family silver. They gave it, and we would give it, but not to this crowd. I wouldn’t eat with a wooden spoon for the sake of the entire government. * * * * * _November 30th._ A yellow fog has descended on the town. The houses have disappeared in it, and the rooms are dark, as if the windows were covered outside with mud-coloured blinds. Though it is forenoon, the lamps are burning in the houses, as if a corpse were laid out in every room in the town. I never saw a fog like this. It looks the very picture of our lives.