There was not one of those men, whose portraits followed the child with their black eyes, who was not recorded in the history of his country for some startling deed or noble sacrifice.  All had fought for Hungary:  the greater part had died for her.  There was a saying that the deathbed of the Zilahs was a bloody battleground.  When he offered his name and his life to Maria Theresa, one of the Zilah princes had said proudly to the Empress:  “You demand of the Hungarians gold, they bring you steel.  The gold was to nourish your courtiers, the steel will be to save your crown.  Forward!” These terrible ancestors were, 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 sabre.  The liberal education which he had received, Prince Sandor transmitted to his son.  The peasants, who detested the pride of the Magyars, and the middle classes of the cities, mostly tradesmen who envied the castles of these magnates, soon became attracted, fascinated, and enraptured with this transformation in the ancient family of the Zilahs.  No man, not even Georgei, the Spartanlike soldier, nor the illustrious Kossuth, was more popular in 1849, at the time of the struggle against Austria, than Prince Sandor Zilah and his son, then a handsome boy of sixteen, but strong and well built as a youth of twenty.

At this youthful age, Andras Zilah had been one of those magnates, who, the ‘kalpach’ on the head, the national ‘attila’ over the shoulder and the hand upon the hilt of the sword, had gone to Vienna to plead before the Emperor the cause of Hungary.  They were not listened to, and one evening, the negotiations proving futile, Count Batthyanyi said to Jellachich: 

“We shall soon meet again upon the Drave!”

“No,” responded the Ban of Croatia, “I will go myself to seek you upon the Danube!”

This was war; and Prince Sandor went, with his son, to fight bravely for the old kingdom of St. Stephen against the cannon and soldiers of Jellachich.

All these years of blood and battle were now half forgotten by Prince Andras; but often Yanski Varhely, his companion of those days of hardship, the bold soldier who in former times had so often braved the broadsword of the Bohemian cuirassiers of Auersperg’s regiment, would recall to him the past with a mournful shake of the head, and repeat, ironically, the bitter refrain of the song of defeat: