After long-continued scientific investigations, materially assisted by a vigorous imagination, Thomas Bodza had constructed a map of his own, in which the various countries appeared in a shape diverging essentially from that which they actually occupy, and indeed only the figure of the virgin Europa, and the outlines of the unchangeable water-courses made one suspect that it was a representation of the old world at all. Not only did the boundaries of the realm suffer strange permutations, but the classical termination "grad,"[5] unusual and unnatural as it seemed to all but the initiated, was tacked on pretty frequently to the names of purely Hungarian towns both small and great; and there was also noticeable this slight and fanciful deviation from the strict truth, to wit, that whereas cities of unappropriatable Asiatic origin like Debreczen, Kecskemet, Nagy-Köros, and others, appeared degraded into insignificant villages by being marked with tiny points, every little twopenny-halfpenny Slavonic village in the Carpathians was magnified into a cathedral city, or starred to represent a formidable fortress. [Footnote 5: The Slavonic word for "town," thus Constantinople is Tsargrad.] The worthy pædagogue used to sit brooding over this map for hours. He would draw his boundaries with a pair of compasses, construct imaginary roads from town to town, and reconstruct a fortress from the imposing ruins in the bed of the River Waag. Nay, he even ventured upon the audacious experiment of cutting through the mountain chain separating the River Hernád from the River Poprád, and uniting these two rivers (in a state of nature they flow in diametrically opposite directions) into one broad continuous water-course, thus bringing together all the various branches of that scattered family of kindred nations which dwells between the White Sea and the Black. In those days very little was known among us of railways beyond the rumour (the newspapers mentioned it as a sort of curiosity) that a certain Englishman, called William Griffiths, wanted to make a wheel-track of iron. Thomas Bodza's idea therefore of a continuous European waterway almost deserved to be called sublime. Such exaltation is innocent enough in itself. It is found, more or less, in every race, and is especially vigorous wherever an impoverished, orphaned stock is aware of the existence of a powerful, dominating, gigantic kinsman beyond a mountain range.[6] Unfortunately, however, this exaltation did not remain an empty poetical dream in the bosom of our village pædagogue. [Footnote 6: _E.g._, The Slovaks in north Hungary, who know that Russia lies beyond the Carpathians.]