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He had read the history of Themistocles who, with a handful of Greeks, converted millions of Persians into rubbish heaps; he had read of the exploits of the valiant Marahas, who, when one of their warriors flung his sandal into the air and uttered thrice the word: "Marha, Marha, Marha!" swept the Roman legions from the face of Pannonia; he had learnt from the Spanish historian all about Ferdinand VII., who chased the Moors from the Alhambra where they had held sway for hundreds of years; he had read of the Scythian Bertezena, who, starting in life as a simple smith had delivered his race from the grinding yoke of the Geougs; and finally he had not only read but learnt by heart all the great works of our savants in which it is demonstrated with the most exact scholarship and the most inflexible logic, that the Greeks, the Marahas, the Spaniards, the Scythians, and, in fact, all the most famous nations of the earth have originated from a single powerful race which numbers among its chiefest branches, such noble nations as the Russians, the Poles, the Bohemians, and the Croats, &c., inasmuch as the languages of all these various nations are so crammed with original Slavonic words, that if these words were suddenly demanded back from them by their rightful owners, any sort of verbal intercourse amongst the nations in question would be henceforth impossible.

The Limigantes were permitted to pass the Danube; and the emperor gave audience to the multitude in a large plain near the modern city of Buda. They surrounded the tribunal, and seemed to hear with respect an oration full of mildness and dignity when one of the Barbarians, casting his shoe into the air, exclaimed with a loud voice, Marha!

Marha! * a word of defiance, which was received as a signal of the tumult. They rushed with fury to seize the person of the emperor; his royal throne and golden couch were pillaged by these rude hands; but the faithful defence of his guards, who died at his feet, allowed him a moment to mount a fleet horse, and to escape from the confusion.