What wrath and raging there was! The
regulation of property-ownership had been executed during the
trusteeship, and as Abonyi believed, with outrageous curtailment and
robbery of the lords of the estate. The best, most fertile fields--so
he asserted--had been allotted to the parish, the most sandy, barren
tracts of the land to him; the parish had the beautiful oak forest,
which had already been shamefully ravaged, he, on the other hand,
received the reed-grown, marshy border of the stream; in the division
of the pasturage the peasants had the easily cultivated plain, which
was therefore at once ploughed by the new owners, he, on the contrary,
the gravelly, steep hillside; in short, he was almost insane with rage
when he first saw what the commission had made of his land, and the
trustee who had unresistingly agreed to all these unjust acts would
have fared badly, if he could have laid hands upon him the first time
he went to inspect the bounds of the parish. There was nothing for him
to do, however, except to adapt himself to the new state of affairs as
well as he could; for nothing could be accomplished by indictments,
because the trustee had possessed full legal authority to act, and
everything had been done in strict accordance with the law.
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