There he lay, prone, stiff, and breathless.

In vain they tickled his nose and his heels; he did not stir.

Then they placed him on the table with a circle of burning candles round him like one laid out for burial, and the heydukes had to sing dirges over him, as over a corpse, while the poet was obliged to stand upon a chair and pronounce his funeral oration.
And the Nabob laughed till he got blue in the face.
* * * * * While these things were going on in one of the rooms of the "Break-'em-tear-'em" _csarda_, fresh guests were approaching that inhospitable hostelry.

These were the companions of the carriage that had come to grief by sticking fast in the mud of the cross-roads, for, after the men and beasts belonging to it had striven uselessly for three long hours to move it from the reef on which it had foundered, the gentleman sitting alone inside it had hit upon the peculiar idea of being carried to the _csarda_ on man-back instead of on horseback.

He mounted, therefore, on to the shoulders of his huntsman, a broadly built, sturdy fellow, and leaving his lackey in the carriage to look after whatever might be there, and making the postillion march in front with the carriage lamp, he trotted in this humorous fashion to the _csarda_, where the muscular huntsman safely deposited him in the porch.
It will be worth while to make the acquaintance of the new-comer, as far as we can at least, as soon as possible.
From his outward appearance it was plain that he did not belong to the gentry of the _Alfoeld_.
As he divested himself of his large mantle with its short Quiroga collar, he revealed a costume so peculiar that if any one showed himself in it in the streets in our days, not only the street urchins but we ourselves should run after it.