In Hétfalu "Leather-bell" was the nickname of a peculiar man, whose real name had quite slipped out of everybody's memory. This derisive epithet was given to him by the housewives to whom he used to convey all the local gossip, to wit: who it was who died to-day, where he was going to be buried, whose turn it was to work for the castle this day or that, who was doing the rector's cooking for him, &c, &c, &c. This was the name he went by throughout the parish when he went about telling everybody in which house there was going to be a birth, a marriage, or a funeral; who was in need of the last sacraments, or how much wine the squire gave for the use of the Lord's Table. This was the title by which he was greeted at the castle, where he religiously presented himself to inform the good folks there where serviceable domestics could be got, or where anything was to be sold, or what were the current prices of corn and poultry. He himself was half the servant of the gentry, and half the servant of the community; nay, he belonged somewhat to the village priest also, and indeed to any good fellow who had a glass of beer to offer him. He was perpetually scurrying from house to house, from the local magistrate's residence to the market-place, from the market-place to the castle, from the castle to the parsonage, from the parsonage to the miller's, the pot-house, and the tavern, thence into the fields, and thence again into the courtyards. He would pick up something here and something there, something he might, perhaps, have heard at the church porch or up in the belfry; or something would catch his ear as he was dawdling among the waggons on a market-day, and he would immediately run and repeat it at the miller's. By the time he had reached the pot-house he would hear his own invention, already well amplified and nicely embellished, circulating from mouth to mouth as an absolute fact. Whereupon he would dash off with this enlarged edition of it to the castle, stopping, however, to tell it to every living soul he met on the way with all the variations which struck him as most appropriate on the spur of the moment, so that he really well-earned the epithet of "Leather-bell," inasmuch as he was performing all the functions of a bell, and, nevertheless was covered with a coat of skin or leather.[17] [Footnote 17: The Hungarian word "bör" means both skin and leather.] On this particular momentous evening, the Leather-bell, all hurry-scurry, rushed into the porch of the castle, where the old lord of the manor was nursing his invalided limbs in an ample easy chair, having so disposed himself as to be able to command a view of the western sky, still lit up by the faint hues of sunset.