This was the signal for a general devastation. The mania for destruction is contagious. It needs but one to begin it, and the mob, as if rejoicing at the sight, is never so ready as when there is something to be pulled, torn, or smashed to bits. In an instant every piece of furniture was broken up and every bit of tapestry torn down. Splendid costumes, costly, fur-trimmed pelisses, gala-mantles--everything was torn to pieces. They ripped open the feather-beds, scattered the eider-down out of the windows, and bellowed to those who stood below--"It is snowing! it is snowing!" whereupon all the others came rushing up to tear and pull to pieces what still remained whole. They pulled up the fragrant jasmines by the roots to make posies of them, and cut up into neckties the delicate tapestries which Lady Banfi had worked with her own hands. Stealing gave the Szeklers no pleasure, it was destruction for its own sake that they found so delightful. Thus they threw to the ground a rare and costly clock which needed winding only once a year, broke it up, distributed the wheels and chains as buckles for their shoes, and melted the silver keys into bullets, which they fired off into the air. Here too it was edifying to see how Firi Firtos tried to get at the bottom of everything. He took down an antique urn and stuck it on his head upside down by way of a helmet. A clock chain he wound round his loins as a girdle, and he danced about hugging in his arms a huge statue of Gutenberg, declaring that it would make an excellent scarecrow for the Somlyo vineyards. The fragments of the broken furniture they piled up on the hearth, and made a great fire of the priceless ebony, mahogany, and palisander woods. The conflagration of a whole village would not have been half so costly. Over this fire they hung, on a silver chain, a Corinthian amphora of exquisite workmanship by way of a kettle, filled it with finely-chopped mutton, and sent Firi Firtos out for beans, salt, and onions. He brought them instead green coffee beans, white powdered sugar, and the most costly tulip, amaryllis, and hyacinth bulbs, all of which they threw pell-mell into the kettle, with the natural consequence that the mess, when finished, was very nearly the death of them all, and the end of it was that they pitched Firi Firtos neck and crop into the courtyard.