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While she was thinking of these things, and drying her streaming eyes, she suddenly heard in the court below the tune of one of her favorite songs, which ran thus: The cloud wherein the crow doth stay, The dark black cloud will pass away! Someone was playing this air on a Hungarian field-trumpet. This instrument is called the farogato, and very few know how to play it.
Who, under such circumstances, had any time to notice that Zurdoki was constantly whispering to the lady of the house? Next followed a splendid banquet of four-and-twenty courses. During the meal Simplex played on the farogato, so as to put even the gypsy musicians to shame.
We have said this much about the farogato in order to give some idea of the great joy which arose in Michal's heart, when she suddenly heard it playing her favorite song.
She, however, would take nothing but broth, so that she might say she was ill and not be obliged to get up. And night after night she listened at the window to the farogato, and it sometimes seemed to her as if someone was urging the musician to play with all his might. Meanwhile Henry steadily plied his trade. The better to inure him to it, he was never allowed to be sober for a moment.
But when a real connoisseur takes up the farogato and blows into it with all his might, then indeed he brings forth notes which excite the martial sentiments of every hearer, notes which can be heard for two miles round. It sounds just as if a host were marching forth to battle and to victory. It was this instrument which, thirty years later, inspired the rebel troops of Rakóczy in the campaigns.
The young lady was quite bewildered. She let them do what they liked with her. Outside the moon had gone down. It had grown quite dark. A silent, starless night, dank with heavy falling dew. "Now he'll be here almost directly," cried the witch, as the water bubbled away at the bottom of the pan. And now the blare of a farogato began to resound through the silent night.
The worshipful town council had a very hard time of it that day. In the early morning, two squadrons of Walloon cuirassiers had marched into the town, blowing, not the Hungarian farogato whose richly varying melodies so much delighted the people, but those shrill trumpets which were only invented for the annoyance of mankind.
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