King Matthias and the Beggar Boy

Things had been going on very pleasantly for some weeks, and Michael and his attractive little neighbour had been growing more and more intimate with each other, when one evenin...

One is apt to fancy that strange, out-of-the-way characters must needs be striking and uncommon in their persons, and it is really quite startling to find them after all mere or...

Michael found himself very well off in his new quarters; and as nothing happened to explain the king's whim, he was confirmed in his belief that its only object was to make him...

It was true that the king had made a man of him, and already Tornay was a marked personage--a man whose name was often in people's mouths, and well known in the army as a rising...

Soon after the conversation recorded in the last chapter, Miska was sent back again to Visegrad to take his place, and learn his duties as king's page; and the king had bidden h...

Towards the close of a gloomy day in autumn, a very dusty traveller was riding quietly up to a castle which stood perched on a height in one of the northern counties of Hungary....

The beggar boy stopped for a moment to roll the purse up carefully in a rag, and to put it and the letter away in the pocket of his dilapidated old jacket. This done he ran on a...

Great men--especially the very few who are great even in their night-shirts, as the saying is, which was the case with King Matthias, if it ever was with any one--great men are,...

King Matthias had been elected to the throne of Hungary in 1457, when he was at most but eighteen years old. But if any of the great nobles fancied that they were going to do ju...