He was a wealthy Hungarian magnate who owned several villages, each of them bigger than Idvor, and this answer coming from a son of poor Idvor amused him much. From that moment on our conference was much less formal, and became even cordial when he offered me coffee and cigarettes. I jokingly told him that Magyarism and Teutonism had driven me away from Panchevo and Prague, and now that I was back for a visit I wished to pay them back with a little present of a few American ideas. “Your American ideas,” he retorted jokingly, “will make you even less popular here than your Serb nationalism did eleven years ago. Drop them while you are here. You’ll have more fun shooting wild ducks in the lowlands of the Tamish River near Idvor than clearing up to dullards the American point of view. The duck season is on, and it is a pity to miss a single day. I’ll lend you an American gun which is just right for that sort of business.” He did, and that gun kept me busy and saved him the trouble of watching my movements. The village notary accompanied me on my shooting tramps; he was an expert fisherman and shot, and spared no pains to please me and--the Fehispan. A two weeks’ tramp in the marshes of the Tamish River, chasing the elusive duck, diminished my haste to harmonize the political point of view of the Serbs in the Voyvodina with American ideas. When the vintage was over, toward the end of September, I made ready to start for Cambridge. I was sorry to leave, because the merry season in Voyvodina is on when the vintage is over and the new wine has ceased fermenting. The golden crops are then all in, and the lazy pigs are fat and round, and ready to be served at wedding-feasts. In other lands it is the springtime when the young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of love; in the Serb Voyvodina it is the autumn season which has that mysterious power. It is in the autumn when marriage-bells never cease ringing, and the bagpipes with the merry songs of wedding-feasts stir up the hearts from one end of the Banat plains to the other. But my mother diverted my attention to more serious thoughts, and she assured me that she was even more happy preparing me for my journey to Cambridge than she was when, eleven years before, she was preparing me for my journey to Prague.