confound all the conventional casuistries which they meet. They are all mind, and yet they are full of fiery passions. Nothing about them, however, is more remarkable than that they have found so hearty a welcome from the public. It seems to prove that artists, having learned that the meek do not inherit the earth, have set out to earn it by other methods than meekness; and that the earth is taking a sporting interest in this change of front. One minor item should be insisted upon. Tessa, from whom the book is named, is not really the heroine, or at least is not the most striking character in the book. That honor goes to her sister Tony. C. V. D. Though Casanova has until the last decade been but a name to Americans outside of a few scholars and collectors of curiosa, he is now the center of a growing library. Of the most recent Of the most recent items, the volume by Mr. Buck consists of notes and documents brought together in a compact form from the researches of various European Casanovists, and all bearing upon the period of Casanova's life after he ceased to write his memoirs. Mr. Bleakley has confined himself largely to reproducing the portion of the memoirs which relate to Casanova's visit to England during the years 1763-4, with skilful annotations identifying the persons with whom the visitor came in contact and with corrections of frequent inaccuracies. From Mr. Machen's complete translation of the memoirs has been excerpted, with a brief introduction but without notes, the chapters dealing with Casanova's term in prison in Venice during 1755-6 and his escape. All these books are interesting, but no commentator upon Casanova is ever as interesting as Casanova himself; and Casanova is nowhere as interesting as in his famous narrative of jail-breaking. Was there ever so active, resolute, and indomitable a rogue? Young Mrs. Cruse. By Viola Meynell. Harcourt, Brace and Company. This book contains one longish story and half a dozen short ones, but though the bulk is inconsiderable, the execution is perfect. The stories are as lucid as water, and as incompressible and as satisfying. It will be said, no doubt, that they are of the school of Katherine Mansfield; they are actually not to be classified without injustice. In each of them a human situation is vividly conceived and subtly communicated. Such books, coming from England, where new types of brief narrative are springing up, may help to break down the imbecile objection to volumes of short stories in the United States. Paul Bunyan. By Esther Shephard. Seattle: The McNeil Press. Paul Bunyan. By James Stevens. Alfred A. Knopf. Reviewed on pages 242-4 of this issue of THE CENTURY MAGAZINE. Vol. 110 E July, 1925 A Childhood in High Hungary The Making of a Noblewoman BY COUNTESS Katinka KAROLYI VE is nine, and Adam is seven, and even as I write to-day Judith is lighting six candles for her birthday tea. They are my children, all of them in the King Alfred School on the edge of Hampstead Heath. The school is called experimental and modern, but when first it was commended to me I was minded to say, "So are all schools experimental -an experiment on the children." This one is coeducational. I remember quite well as a child keeping a diary full of little maxims on how to bring up children, and though I did not record, "Believe in coeducation," it is certain I wrote down that the girls ought not to be shut off so by themselves. People will tell you yet in Budapest that such an arrangement may be all right for cold Northern people like the English, but that in Hungary we had not the temperament. Later I shall send my three to the Bedell School, in the north of England. To a public school Adam shall never go. Lives made snobbish at the start are so poor, and the public school boys I have known seem to wander through life wanting to meet other old school boys. No. 3 And for lack of knowing girls at school and early learning easily to understand and admire them as equals in sportsmanship and scholarship, they miss something fine. I wish my children to be free and eager, disciplined from within and not from without. So far they are happy and busy in King Alfred School. There are no rewards there, and no punishments. A child, to be sure, who comes late is set to work in the garden, and one of my children works in the garden often; but whether because he is sluggard or secretly fond of his gardening task, the experiment does n't yet show. My school-girl days in Hungary were far different. When I look at Adam and Eve and Judith, I can hardly believe that the Andrassy nurseries where I grew up happened thirty years ago and a thousand miles away. It must have been four centuries ago and ten thousand miles from Hampstead Heath. Let me tell you. Part of all this I remember, but now and then there is a patch that is only legend. The day I was born was a day of disappointment. My mother was at Tisa Copyright, 1925, by THE CENTURY Co. All rights reserved. 259 Dob, the estate of my uncle, Count Julius Andrassy. Miles around the land was ours, and all through the castle people clasped and unclasped their hands and prayed for an heir. The nurse called out the news as I came, "The heir is born," and the news went like wind up the stairs to my grandmother's chamber. "It is a boy," they said. Rejoicing seemed to shake the farthest stables and the kitchens; and then upon the heels of joy, news that the third Andrassy child was just another girl. One brief false spank to the ancient sails, and then a dull, becalmed nursery as before, with nothing but girls to show. It was a stern household into which I was born. In my grandfather's day he was Count Julius Andrassy who was for long foreign minister for the Emperor Francis Joseph and the designer of the Dual Monarchy-the Andrassys were a great and compact royal tribe, with my grandfather at the head. Long after they were married, his sons never thought of going out in the evening to their clubs without first asking the chief's permission. Dinner-this is legend, for my grandfather died five years before I was born-was always followed by long evenings of discussion of politics, philosophy, and art, and all the members of the family took part. My father did not keep up the old ritual, for he was at heart an artist. He was more than an ordinarily good painter, and though he had a patriotic interest in politics, he was a mild and debonair ruler in the drawing-room at TokeTerebes, now alienated from Hungary as Czechoslovak territory. The castle at Toke-Terebes was modern, built in the time of Maria Theresa, a big horseshoe-shaped place; but the ruins of the first castle of Terebes, whose foundations had been dug for the Andrassys in the year 1500, were still there. My grandmother I remember as a mild, very beautiful old lady, with eyes as blue as morning sky from the nursery window, smiling from a finely wrinkled face white with the soft whiteness of almond-blossoms. “What is news?" she would say when the three of us, Ilona, Boy, which was short for Barbara, and I came to call on her and kissed her hand. Now "news" and "newspaper" in Magyar are the same word, and each time the question came, a secret mirth would overtake me that such an old lady should n't know that I could n't even read, and that no newspapers came with the Kneippe coffee and bread at the nursery breakfast. We remember so naturally and in such odd proportions the important events of three years old! The bright blue eyes of my grandmother and the yellow-andblack Italian pot, with a lid which she lifted to take out crummy cakes-the one is quite as vivid as the other. One morning my governess put me into a new frock. Most of what we had, in the economical way of the Hungarian aristocracy, were rather shabby garments handed down from the many cousins. Ilona and Boy, too, were starched and solemn in fresh black dresses. For six months we wore the new dresses; that was because our grandmother was dead. When people turned in the street to look at me in my somber cap and jacket, I was warm with pleasure at being noticed. Not long after I began to follow the rigorous régime of the nursery. On the wall hung the schedule, which began at seven o'clock. Every minute |