When I got home I told my mother what had happened. She listened to me with a stern face, in silence. “They carried away whatever they could. They even stripped the mattresses. They scribbled filth on the walls.” “These times levy toll on everybody,” said she. “What about those who are driven from their homes, whose houses are burnt down, who are murdered? If only fate will be satisfied with this and ask no more from us, if this is all we have to pay, we shall have no reason to complain.” And she did not mention the matter again. The evening papers were brought in. One name dominated them all: Gyulafehérvár.... In the town where John Hunyádi, the Hungarian paladin of Christendom against the Turks, lies buried, over his grave, on the field at the foot of the castle, the Roumanian Irredenta under the name of “Roumanian National Council” has carried a resolution: “Transylvania, the Banat and all the territories of Hungary inhabited by Roumanians are united with Roumania!”... This happened in Gyulafehérvár, and Károlyi’s Government sent the Roumanians by special train to this assembly of treason! He even armed a bodyguard for them, and has given them millions! Once more life seems like the dream of a demented brain. “Everything is yours,” says the Government, so that it may take what the robbers cannot carry off. They share and share alike, and what care they that in making their division they break our hearts? The Hungarian population of Transylvania, abandoned, humiliated, betrayed, must tolerate that its ancient land should be thrown by Budapest to an uneducated, newly-risen Balkan state, whose shepherd folk, fleeing from the cruelty of its own princes, came to Hungary asking for hospitality, a few hundred years ago. The Széklers have lived for fifteen hundred years in Transylvania, and the semi-barbarous Roumanian people now laugh in the face of the original inhabitants, and by right of robbery declare that what was always ours is now their own. The street is quiet. The town listens with a stony heart. The stars alone tremble above the roofs as if a great sob rose to them _de profundis_. * * * * * _December 3rd._ I went to Buda, to the Castle Hill. We had a meeting at five at Count Zichy’s palace. This house was built in the eighteenth century and is one of Buda’s finest palaces. Maria Theresa, powdered and bewigged, once lived here, and her presence still seems to linger about the walls. The stone staircase rises loftily to the hall on the first floor, whose low, decorated roof is supported by white pillars. On the white walls glittered the gilt frames of old pictures.