The woman for whom we were asked for wine yesterday was buried to-day. The coffin was placed on the ground in the clean-swept little farmyard, and her mother arranged the corpse as though she were putting it to bed. Suddenly she knelt down beside the coffin and with her trembling, rugged old hand stroked the rough boards and cried aloud: “Good God, why hast thou taken her from me, why could not I die in her place?...” Thus do mothers address grim death. What will they say when the attempt is made to take their living children from them? Her lament became louder and louder and dominated the ceremony. The Cantor said farewell to the deceased in verses, singing them to an old-fashioned melody which he repeated over and over again. This melody contained the memory of ancient bards and the sorrows of wandering troubadours; the verses mentioned by name all the mourning relations, each of whom, as his name was pronounced, sobbed loudly, as though expressing his personal grief in the general mourning. When the husband was named he pressed his face into his doffed hat and his shoulders shook with sobs. The others had their turn, but the old woman alone lamented from the beginning to the end. Everybody wept over his own sorrow, in the coffin alone there were no tears. The tree in the yard stretched over it, and as the branches swayed in the wind the dim sunlight threw their shadow over the coffin. The shadow revealed that there were fresh buds on the branches, signs of nature’s resurrection, and I realised that spring was coming. “_In Paradisum_....” The priest blessed the coffin, blessed it as he blesses an infant at a christening, the couples at a wedding, with the same large movement which has served since the time of Christ for the blessing on this earth of new life, of love and of death. In Budapest the Red Power has decreed that from this day Christ’s churches are to be closed and kinematographs established in them. The Christian priesthood is threatened with the halter. The teaching orders are expelled and the nuns driven from the bedside of the sick and the cradles of the orphans. The dresses of their Orders are torn from them. Their buildings become Communist meeting-places and the scenes of secret orgies.