Springs were conceived in pain. Summers brought forth their harvests in tears. In the autumnal mists the withered hands of tottering old men held the plough as it followed the silver-grey long-horned oxen. A carriage might travel many miles without passing a single man at work in the fields. All were under foreign skies—or under foreign soil, while the panic-stricken towns were invaded by hordes of Galician fugitives. A new type of buyer appeared in the markets, on the Exchange. The Ghetto of Pest was thronged. Goods disappeared and prices began to soar. Misery stalked with a subdued wail through the land, while the new rich rattled their gold impudently. A part of the aristocracy and the wealth-laden Jewry danced madly in the famished towns, amidst a weeping land. Now and then dark news came from the distant tempest of blood. Now and then flags of victory were unfurled and the church bells rang for the Te Deum. One morning the flags were of a black hue, and the church bells tolled for death: The King is dead!... Long live the King! [Illustration: KING CHARLES. _Photo. Kosel, Vienna._ (_To face p. 36._)] The old ruler closed his eyes after a long watch, and the reins of the two countries fell from his aged hands. In Vienna: an imperial funeral and imperial mourning; in Buda: a coronation shining with the lustre of ancient gold. The clouds had broken! With his veiled, white-faced wife the young King passed like a vision through his royal town. But it was all a dream. The King was in a hurry. In vain did his people proffer their devotion at the gate of his castle: he was incapable of grasping the moment, and departed before he had gathered this royal treasure. So the wind scattered the despised love of the nation. Something froze under the Hungarian sky, and in chilled soberness the morrow dawned. In those times the winters were cold in Hungary. They froze one to the marrow as they had never done before. There was scarcely any fuel. Along the walls of the houses in Pest, children, girls, and old people thronged at the entrance to the coal merchants. They sat on the edge of the pavement, shivered and waited. At the horse-butchers, at the communal shops, in front of bakers’, and dairymen’s, long rows of sad women waited from dawn till late into the night. Quiet, patient women ... waiting.... Everybody was waiting—for life, for death, for news, for somebody to return. The hospitals were overcrowded, and all through the land, from one end to the other, the roads resounded with the wooden clatter of crutches. That was the once happy Hungary! But hope and honour were still alive. Our war was a war of self-defence. Perhaps we, of all the combatants, had nothing to gain, had no ambition to take anything from any other country.