Midnight drew nearer amid the clatter of fire-arms. As at Christmas, we again gathered at my sister Mary’s. The New-Year’s punch was standing ready in long fluted glasses, and the children kept looking at the clock. I had a letter in my hand; it had come from the capital of Transylvania with the last Hungarian post, behind it the barrier had crashed down. It was just like getting news of the death of a relation during the war, and after he had been buried receiving the last letter from his hand. My heart bled, though I did not know, and had never seen, the writer of the epistle. I read it out aloud: KOLOZSVAR, December 23rd, 1918. I have just read in the Sunday issue of ‘Az Ujsag’ your article ‘Awake.’ I cannot describe what I felt when I read your lines, and yet I feel I must write to you. Every word of your terrible, biting truth has engraved itself upon my heart. It is this tone, this hard, bitter language, that we need to-day; we need it as much as a starving man needs a bit of bread, as a drowning person needs something to cling to. That is what we want: the proclamation of our confidence, our self-respect, to a world in which every nation boils with patriotism while we Hungarians, alone, proclaim internationalism, humility, and resignation—far beyond the necessities of our miserable condition. It is true: our leaders don’t feel Hungary’s death—and, what is worse, our poets are silent as if they too were insensible to it. I cannot thank you enough that in this backboneless, collapsing, suicidal Hungarian world you have had courage enough to throw it in our teeth. How many Hungarians like you are there in the de-nationalised heart of our country, and how many Hungarian writers besides you feel there, what we feel here, when this evening brings us the burden of the certainty that to-morrow, on Christmas Eve, Roumanian troops will tread the streets of Kolozsvar? I write these lines from the unhappy soil of Transylvania on the eve of the occupation of its capital. I beg of you don’t forsake us poor Hungarians in the future. Write for us. We welcome your lines, your writings, as prisoners in their dungeon welcome rays of sunshine. It is possible that politically we shall fall to pieces, that the predatory nations who fall upon us will tear us to shreds, but the meeting of Gyulafehervar cannot make a law, the Government Council of Nagy Szeben has not power enough, and the Roumanian occupation cannot bring in an army big enough to tear from our hearts that which was written there by your pen. As long as the Hungarian spirit lives, there is hope for our resurrection. I remain, etc., VEGVARI.