grandson, of the servants whose friendly faces had been familiar
to me in my early childhood. As a matter of fact he had no such

claim on my consideration. He was the product of some village
near by and was there on his promotion, having learned the

service in one or two houses as pantry-boy. I know this because
I asked the worthy V-- next day. I might well have spared the

question. I discovered before long that all the faces about the
house and all the faces in the village: the grave faces with

long moustaches of the heads of families, the downy faces of the
young men, the faces of the little fair-haired children, the

handsome, tanned, wide-browed faces of the mothers seen at the
doors of the huts were as familiar to me as though I had known

them all from childhood, and my childhood were a matter of the
day before yesterday.

The tinkle of the traveller's bels, after growing louder, had
faded away quickly, and the tumult of barking dogs in the village

had calmed down at last. My uncle, lounging in the corner of a
small couch, smoked his long Turkish chibouk in silence.

"This is an extremely nice writing-table you have got for my
room," I remarked.

"It is really your property," he said, keeping his eyes on me,
with an interested and wistful expression as he had done ever

since I had entered the house. "Forty years ago your mother used
to write at this very table. In our house in Oratow it stood in

the little sitting-room which, by a tacit arrangement, was given
up to the girls--I mean to your mother and her sister who died so

young. It was a present to them jointly from our uncle Nicholas
B. when your mother was seventeen and your aunt two years

younger. She was a very dear, delightful girl, that aunt of
yours, of whom I suppose you know nothing more than the name.

She did not shine so much by personal beauty and a cultivated
mind, in which your mother was far superior. It was her good

sense, the admirablesweetness of her nature, her exceptional
facility and ease in daily relations that endeared her to

everybody. Her death was a terrible grief and a serious moral
loss for us all. Had she lived she would have brought the

greatest blessings to the house it would have been her lot to
enter, as wife, mother and mistress of a household. She would

have created round herself an atmosphere of peace and content
which only those who can love unselfishly are able to evoke.

Your mother--of far greater beauty, exceptionally" target="_blank" title="ad.异常地；极，很">exceptionally distinguished
in person, manner and intellect--had a less easy disposition.

Being more brilliantly" target="_blank" title="ad.灿烂地；杰出地">brilliantlygifted she also expected more from life.
At that trying time especially, we were greatly concerned about

her state. Suffering in her health from the shock of her
father's death (she was alone in the house with him when he died

suddenly), she was torn by the inward struggle between her love
for the man whom she was to marry in the end and her knowledge of

her dead father's declared objection to that match. Unable to
bring herself to disregard that cherished memory and that

judgment she had always respected and trusted, and, on the other
hand, feeling the impossibility to resist a sentiment so deep and

so true, she could not have been expected to preserve her mental
and moral balance. At war with herself, she could not give to

others that feeling of peace which was not her own. It was only
later, when united at last with the man of her choice that she

developed those uncommon gifts of mind and heart which compelled
the respect and admiration even of our foes. Meeting with calm

fortitude the cruel trials of a life reflecting all the national
and social misfortunes of the community, she realised the highest

conceptions of duty as a wife, a mother and a patriot, sharing
the exile of her husband and representing nobly the ideal of

Polish womanhood. Our Uncle Nicholas was not a man very
accessible to feelings of affection. Apart from his worship for

Napoleon the Great, he loved really, I believe, only three people
in the world: his mother--your great-grandmother, whom you have

seen but cannot possibly remember; his brother, our father, in
whose house he lived for so many years; and of all of us, his

nephews and nieces grown up round him, your mother alone. The
modest, lovable qualities of the youngest sister he did not seem

able to see. It was I who felt most profoundly this unexpected
stroke of death falling upon the family less than a year after I

had become its head. It was terriblyunexpected. Driving home
one wintry afternoon to keep me company in our empty house, where

I had to remain permanently administering the estate and
attending to the complicated affairs--(the girls took it in turn

week and week about)--driving, as I said, from the house of the
Countess Tekla Potochka, where our invalid mother was staying

then to be near a doctor, they lost the road and got stuck in a
snowdrift. She was alone with the coachman and old Valery, the

personal servant of our late father. Impatient of delay while
they were trying to dig themselves out, she jumped out of the

sledge and went to look for the road herself. All this happened
in '51, not ten miles from the house in which we are sitting now.

The road was soon found, but snow had begun to fall thickly
again, and they were four more hours getting home. Both the men

took off their sheepskin-lined great-coats and used all their own
rugs to wrap her up against the cold, notwithstanding her

protests, positive orders and even struggles, as Valery
afterwards related to me. 'How could I,' he remonstrated with

her, 'go to meet the blessed soul of my late master if I let any
harm come to you while there's a spark of life left in my body?'

When they reached home at last the poor old man was stiff and
speechless from exposure, and the coachman was in not much better

plight, though he had the strength to drive round to the stables
himself. To my reproaches for venturing out at all in such

weather, she answered characteristically that she could not bear
the thought of abandoning me to my cheerless solitude. It is

incomprehensible how it was that she was allowed to start. I
suppose it had to be! She made light of the cough which came on

next day, but shortly afterwards inflammation of the lungs set
in, and in three weeks she was no more! She was the first to be

taken away of the young generation under my care. Behold the
vanity of all hopes and fears! I was the most frail at birth of

all the children. For years I remained so delicate that my
parents had but little hope of bringing me up; and yet I have

survived five brothers and two sisters, and many of my
contemporaries; I have outlived my wife and daughter too--and

from all those who have had some knowledge at least of these old
times you alone are left. It has been my lot to lay in an early

grave many honest hearts, many brilliant promises, many hopes
full of life."

He got up brusquely, sighed, and left me, saying: "We will dine
in half an hour." Without moving I listened to his quick steps

resounding on the waxed floor of the next room, traversing the
ante-room lined with bookshelves, where he paused to put his

chibouk in the pipe-stand before passing into the drawing-room
(these were all en suite), where he became inaudible on the thick

carpet. But I heard the door of his study-bedroom close. He was
then sixty-two years old and had been for a quarter of a century

the wisest, the firmest, the most indulgent of guardians,
extending over me a paternal care and affection, a moral support

which I seemed to feel always near me in the most distant parts
of the earth.

As to Mr. Nicholas B., sub-lieutenant of 1808, lieutenant of 1813
in the French Army, and for a short time Officier d'Ordonnance of

Marshal Marmont; afterwards Captain in the 2nd Regiment of
Mounted Rifles in the Polish Army--such as it existed up to 1830

in the reduced kingdom established by the Congress of Vienna--I
must say that from all that more distant past, known to me

traditionally and a little de visu, and called out by the words
of the man just gone away, he remains the most incomplete figure.

It is obvious that I must have seen him in '64, for it is certain
that he would not have missed the opportunity of seeing my mother

for what he must have known would be the last time. From my
early boyhood to this day, if I try to call up his image, a sort

of mist rises before my eyes, a mist in which I perceive vaguely
only a neatly brushed head of white hair (which is exceptional in

the case of the B. family, where it is the rule for men to go
bald in a becoming manner, before thirty) and a thin, curved,