Prince Zilah -- Volume 1

ly Empire, was one of those heroes who devote their wh

e saying. In '48, at the age of fifteen, he was in the saddle, charging the Croatian hussars, the redcloaks, the terrible darkskinned Ottochan horsemen, uttering frightful yells, and brandishing their big

ity, and forcing Soliman the Magnificent to leave thirty thousand soldiers beneath the walls, the Sultan himself dying before he could subjugate the Hungarian. Often had Andras's father, casting his son upon a horse, set out, followed by a train of cavaliers, for Mohacz, where the Mussulmans had once overwhelmed the soldiers of young King Louis, who died with his own family and every Hungarian who was abl

in 1795, fell the heads of noble Hungarians, accused of republi

was beheaded here for his faith. Remember, that a man'

ts in semi-oriental costumes, glittering in steel or draped in purple, who looked down upon him from their frames; smoke-blackened paintings wherein the eagle eyes and long moustaches of black hussars, contemporaries of Sobieski, or magnates in furred robes, with aigrettes in their caps, and cur

the land of the Scythians, brave ancestors, great forefathers, you did not su

beside his wife Hanska who had followed him, leaving in the cradle her son Janski, whose grandson, Zilah Janos, in 1867, at the ver

e, besides, like all the magnates of Hungary, excessively proud of their nobility and their patriarchal system of feudalism. They knew how to protect their peasants, who were trained soldiers, how to fight for them, and how to die at their head; but force seemed to them supreme justice, and they asked nothing but their sword with which to defend their right. Andras's father, Prince Sandor, educated by a French tutor who had been driven from Paris by the Revolution, was the first of all his family to form any perception of a civilization based upon justice and law, and not upon the almighty power of the sabr

over the shoulder and the hand upon the hilt of the sword, had gone to Vienna to plead before the Emperor the cause of

meet again up

Croatia, "I will go myself

, to fight bravely for the old kingdom of St. Step

f hardship, the bold soldier who in former times had so often braved the broadsword of the Bohemian cuirassiers of Auersperg's regime

e, daughter

e measure so

ns by the shot

pleasure, oh!

e, brown daugh

measure of true

; Hungary, beaten by the force of numbers, yet resisting Paskiewich as she had resisted Haynau, and appealing to Europe and the world in the name of the eternal law of nations, which the vanquished invoke, but which is never listened to by the countries where the lion is tearing his prey. And again, Zilah would remember the heroic fatherland str

e, daughter

ts gleams of hope and its flashes of victory, the Prince would revive with

last hours of the siege; and the years of mournful sadness and exile; their companions decimated, imprisoned, led to the gallows or the stake; the frightful silence and ruin falling like a winding-sheet over Hungary; the houses deserted, the

needs? Banat, which gives us wheat; Tisza, wine; the mountain, gold and salt. Our country is sufficie