Both dance and song were peculiar. The girls, all hand in hand, flew round the men, singing a plaintive, dreamy sort of dirge, while the men stamped fiercely on the ground and uttered an intermittent wail. The fire blazing beside them cast a red glare, intermingled with dark flitting shadows, on the wild group. Some distance behind, on the stump of a tree, sat an old bagpiper with his pipes under his arm. The tortured goatskin's monotonous discord blended with the savage harmony of the song. When the pyre had nearly burnt itself out, the dancers suddenly dispersed, dragged forward a female effigy stuffed with straw and clothed in rags, placed it on two poles, and with loud cries of "Marcze Záre! Marcze Záre!"[33] held it over the fire; then, exclaiming in chorus--"Burn to ashes, accursed Wednesday-evening witch!" they threw it into the glowing embers. The girls then danced round the fire with cries of joy till the witch was burned, when the men, with a wild yell, rushed among the embers and trod them out. [Footnote 33: _Marcze Záre_ = Wednesday witch, hags possessing peculiar power on Wednesday evenings, according to the Wallachs.] "Who are ye, and what are you doing here?" cried Clement the Clerk to the Wallachs, who hitherto had not taken the slightest notice of him. "We are they of Marisel who have burned Marcze Záre," answered the peasants unanimously, with the grave faces of men who had just done something uncommonly wise. "Well, be quick about it, and then come back to the village, for I am here by command of the Prince, my master, to put the usual questions to you." "And I," put in Zülfikar, "am here by command of the mighty Ali Pasha of Grosswardein to levy a new tax." The Wallachs watched the Patrol-officer till he was quite out of sight without uttering a word; but they shook their fists after him and exclaimed--"May Marcze Záre take him!" Then, with the bagpiper in front, they formed into a long procession and marched, loudly singing, down towards the distant village. * * * * * It was a long, straggling, Wallachian hamlet at which the patrollers now arrived--one house exactly like another; low clay huts with lofty roofs and projecting eaves, surrounded by quick-set hedges, the doors so low that one had to stoop in order to enter. Every house consisted of a single room, in which the whole family, parents and children, goats and poultry, lived together. At the entrance of the village stood a gigantic triumphal arch made of marble blocks; over the principal portal was the torso of a Minerva; on the façade were battle-pieces in high relief, and beneath them this Latin inscription in large Roman letters--"This town has been built by the unconquerable Trajan as a memorial of his triumph!" And behind the arch a heap of wretched clay huts!