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with particular pleasure in the bosom of his family and friends. His acquisitions, his marriage, the birth of his children, the setting up of the glassworks, his successful career and growing wealth, his election as town councillor—these were the tales he told most gladly. What preceded these glories, it was best to forget. But with the ability to forget he had not, alas, been blessed. He had once read an Italian canticle that said that at the boundary of the Lower World there flowed not only the waters of oblivion, the river Lethe, but also its twin, Eunoe, rising from the same source, the waters of good remembrance. As an infant it must have been of Eunoe that he had been given to drink, though this is the one thing that he cannot recall.
    His strength continued to ebb away and soon he could no longer even sit up. Yet how gladly he would have entered in his folio all that went through his head in these dread times. It would have served to guide his wife and three children inthe days ahead. In adulthood it had been rare indeed for him to end the day without writing copiously on the large pages of the thick album he had brought from Italy for this purpose. It was said to have been made in a famous bible scriptorium and originally intended to bear the Holy Writ. Kornél always wrote in this folio with due respect for its distinguished history. If his descendants desired to know how he had spent the time allotted to him on this earth, they could read all about it in there.
    He had no means of giving an account of the last few hours of his life. He could not write at the top of the page: Chapter the Last: My Decease. Fortunately, he had made his last will and testament the previous year, and in a leaden casket sealed with three seals it awaited the attention of the appropriate authorities. And he had copied the will into his folio.
    Though he had gone over it in his head a hundred, a thousand times, still he was assailed by doubt. Was he right to leave the glassworks to Bálint? Perhaps the lad is not adult enough to manage twenty men, to meet the weekly, monthly totals, to haggle with the tradesmen, to tug his forelock at the nobles most likely to place substantial orders. But he was still young, he had time to grow up.
    Bálint did not take after him. Kornél Sternovszky (Csillag) was of very small build, his limbs thinner and weaker than they should be. Though his legs had remained crooked, so skilled was he at using them that the untrained eye would not have detected that he was lame. No amount of meat and drink would give him a potbelly, and his face had preserved to this day its pleasant, oval shape. Physically he was more or less hale, only the hair over his unusually arched brow had begun to thin, though still only tinged with gray. His moustache and beard had never thickened into a grown man’s, and to his eternal regret resembled more the sprouting hairs of an adolescent.
    How he would have loved to go on living! If only he could hear, just once more, the three smelting ovens bellowed up, the carefully dried wooden logs catching fire with a sudden zizz; then the heat would start its work, the wondrous heat that produced the especially hard-wearing yet splendidly pellucid glassware. Even in the windows of his own house he had fitted lead-framed panes of glass produced in his own works, and would proudly point them out to visitors. Now he saw sadly how the light of the sun beat down through them. Born in the heat of the fire, they loyally continued in the service of warmth: during winter they sealed it in, but let it in during summer, all the while keeping the winds without.
    Turning these thoughts over in his head, he did not notice that Bálint had entered the room and knelt down on the ground by the bed, his face radiant with pious concern. He, too, was aware that soon … The dying man’s eyes filled with tears. God will surely provide. The image of Grandpa Czuczor came into his mind, the person whom outwardly