Once, when they sang this together, at the line "gallops his swift bay steed," the herdsman would throw up his cap to the rafters, and bring down his fist with a crash on the table.
"Don't you care for the song nowadays?" asked the girl. "Even that doesn't please you?"
"Why should it? I'm no 'betyár,' and have nothing to do with thieves. Gendarmes are honest men, and do their duty. As for a good-for-nothing 'betyár,' he sets a girl to watch outside, and as soon as he sees so much as the tip of a gendarme's helmet, he is off and away, 'O'er the boundless waste,' leaving fish and wine and all behind him. And he shouts it out in his own praise too! The cowardly thief!"
"Well, you _have_ changed since you ate the Emperor's bread!"
"I've not changed, but the times. You can turn a coat inside out if you like. After all it is only a coat. A bunda--fur-lined cloak--is always a bunda."
"And do you know," said the girl, "the greatest insult a man can pay his sweetheart is to quote a worn-out old saw like that----"
"But if I know none better! Perhaps the gentlemen from Moravia, who were here last night, had newer jokes to amuse you with?"
"Better jokes!" said the girl. "Anyway they didn't sit here looking like stuck pigs. The painter especially was a very proper young fellow. If he had only been a hair's breadth taller! As it was he just came up to my chin!"
"Rather! Why I taught him to dance csárdás, and he jumped about like a two months old kid on the barn floor!"
"And the cowherd?" asked the man, "did he see you dancing with the German artist, and yet not wring his neck?"
"Wring his neck! Why they drank eternal friendship together!"
"Well, it is not my business. Get me some more wine, but better stuff than this vinegar. I shall have to come out with another old saying, 'The fish is unhappy in the third water,' for the third water should be wine."
"That's a double insult to call my wine--water."
"Never mind," said the herdsman, "just get me a sealed bottle!"
Now it was the undoing of Sándor Decsi that he asked for a sealed bottle, one brought from the town, sealed with green wax, with a pink or blue label pasted on one side, covered with golden letters. Such wine is only fit for gentlefolk, or perhaps for people in the Emperor's pay!