The tinker's native place, like that of many another Slovak tinker, was Kysuca, near the Silesian border. It was not from there, however, that he had just come, but from Nytra, a place of twelve thousand inhabitants, once the capital of the great Moravian Kingdom under Svatopluk, of which Slovakia was an important part. There was scarcely a door at which he did not stop, not merely to do some tinkering but to deliver messages from distant friends or relatives, or to relate what was going on in the greater world. He had been as far as Bohemia in his year's travels, and had much to say of that prosperous and progressive country. His opinions, though sometimes crude, were listened to with respect. "When I first started making my rounds twenty years ago," he said, "I used to stop for a day or two with my wife's cousin in Praha (Prague). Then the Germans had succeeded in getting all the business into their hands; but now the Czechs have got it all back again. The banks, too, are almost all Czech. There is hardly a German sign to be seen anywhere. Every street has its own Czech name; but how the Czechs had to fight for this, and how sore the Germans are over it! The Czech believes in fighting for the right, he believes in educating his children, he is willing to make any sacrifice that will make Bohemia his own again. We're a different people; we are too ignorant to know how to go about things, and when we do know we're so mild we don't do it." "Much good fighting would do us!" remarked Stefan the blacksmith. The other men laughed. "Come and show us how," they said. "I don't mean fist fighting," the tinker returned half angrily. "I mean fighting with brains. Why can't we--" "That's all right," interrupted a young man, his face all aflame, as he stepped into the ring. "But what chance have we to develop our brains when we haven't a single Higher School where the Slovak language is taught? When every opportunity is cut off from one if he somehow manages to educate himself, unless he turns traitor to his mother tongue and swears that he is a Magyar? Don't I know? Didn't I hope to work myself up into a position where I could serve my nation? And you know my record. Imprisonment and imprisonment and imprisonment. The Czechs are helping themselves, but no progress will come for us until the world at large will awaken to its duty of preventing tyranny and exploitation." "True!" muttered many of the men; and then slipped away one by one as some one pointed out the Notary approaching in the distance.