Over the bridge flags were playing in the breeze. Suddenly I saw them no more. There, above the hill, sadly, stood the royal castle. Opposite, on the shore of Pest, the House of Parliament was standing with its darkened stones. The building seemed quite young a year ago. How suddenly it has aged, how tragic have become its bloodstained cellars, its bullet-marked walls, the square where the rabble watched the executions, the stairs leading to the river! On the side of Buda the flags were floating too, on the bridgehead, on the houses. Towards the end of the town the palings showed now and then the traces of torn-off red posters. Then I came in sight of our hills. But since I had last been here the forest has disappeared. The Dictatorship of the Proletariat has exterminated that too. Now I was going up the hill; nobody was waiting for me, nobody knew I was coming. All the way along I was smiling to myself. The high, double roof of our house showed up bright against the blue sky. The gate was open, the pebbles crunched under my feet, I opened the front door. A white wall, an oaken staircase, flowers on my mother’s table. And I stood there, irresolute. Steps were approaching, peculiar steps, as if one foot were slightly dragged behind the other. Blessed steps, beloved steps, I ran to meet them! My mother stood in the door. I felt that I turned pale. Already the flame was dying within her and she was preparing for the long journey. But I will keep her back, she must stay with me. She opened her arms and I felt her, who had always been taller than I, so small, so elusive, against my heart. I will keep her back, will make her stay. [Illustration: ROUMANIAN TROOPS OCCUPYING BUDAPEST. ] And in her arms my outlawry died. I was home again. THE END. APPENDIX. THE CRIMINALS OF THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT[6] By OSCAR SZOLLOSY, LL.D., _Councillor in the Royal Hungarian Ministry of Justice._ Lenin’s well-known axiom to the effect that in revolutions for every honest-minded man (unfortunately) are to be found hundreds of criminals, can scarcely be applied to Hungarian Bolshevism, for among the notorious exponents of the same even the lamp of Diogenes would hardly have enabled us to detect one honest-minded man. Criminalists of long standing who lived through the horrors of the Red Régime in Hungary, which lasted from March 21 to the end of July, 1919, could testify, even without the decisions of the court of laws, that the leading spirits of the ‘Soviet Republic’ (with the exception of a few fanatics) consisted of common criminals, to the greater part of whom might be applied with perfect aptness the definition of Anatole France, ‘_encore bête et déjà un homme_.’