true, and so far effective that the fellows began to scratch

their heads and look irresolute. The speaker then pointed at the
window, exclaiming: "Look! there's all your crowd going away

quietly, and you silly chaps had better go after them and pray
God to forgive you your evil thoughts."

This appeal was an unlucky inspiration.
In crowding clumsily to the window to see whether he was speaking

the truth, the fellows overturned the little writing-table. As
it fell over a chink of loose coin was heard. "There's money in

that thing," cried the blacksmith. In a moment the top of the
delicate piece of furniture was smashed and there lay exposed in

a drawer eighty half imperials. Gold coin was a rare sight in
Russia even at that time; it put the peasants beside themselves.

"There must be more of that in the house, and we shall have it,"
yelled the ex-soldier blacksmith. "This is war-time." The

others were already shouting out of the window, urging the crowd
to come back and help. The priest, abandoned suddenly at the

gate, flung his arms up and hurried away so as not to see what
was going to happen.

In their search for money that bucolic mob smashed everything in
the house, ripping with knives, splitting with hatchets, so that,

as the servant said, there were no two pieces of wood holding
together left in the whole house. They broke some very fine

mirrors, all the windows, and every piece of glass and china.
They threw the books and papers out on the lawn and set fire to

the heap for the mere fun of the thing, apparently. Absolutely
the only one solitary thing which they left whole was a small

ivory crucifix, which remained hanging on the wall in the wrecked
bedroom above a wild heap of rags, broken mahogany, and

splintered boards which had been Mr. Nicholas B.'s bedstead.
Detecting the servant in the act of stealing away with a japanned

tin box, they tore it from him, and because he resisted they
threw him out of the dining-room window. The house was on one

floor, but raised well above the ground, and the fall was so
serious that the man remained lying stunned till the cook and a

stable-boy ventured forth at dusk from their hiding-places and
picked him up. But by that time the mob had departed, carrying

off the tin box, which they supposed to be full of paper money.
Some distance from the house, in the middle of a field, they

broke it open. They found in side documents engrossed on
parchment and the two crosses of the Legion of Honour and For

Valour. At the sight of these objects, which, the blacksmith
explained, were marks of honour given only by the Tsar, they

became extremely frightened at what they had done. They threw the
whole lot away into a ditch and dispersed hastily.

On learning of this particular loss Mr. Nicholas B. broke down
completely. The mere sacking of his house did not seem to affect

him much. While he was still in bed from the shock, the two
crosses were found and returned to him. It helped somewhat his

slow convalescence, but the tin box and the parchments, though
searched for in all the ditches around, never turned up again.

He could not get over the loss of his Legion of Honour Patent,
whose preamble, setting forth his services, he knew by heart to

the very letter, and after this blow volunteered sometimes to
recite, tears standing in his eyes the while. Its terms haunted

him apparently during the last two years of his life to such an
extent that he used to repeat them to himself. This is confirmed

by the remark made more than once by his old servant to the more
intimate friends. "What makes my heart heavy is to hear our

master in his room at night walking up and down and praying aloud
in the French language."

It must have been somewhat over a year afterward that I saw Mr.
Nicholas B.--or, more correctly, that he saw me--for the last

time. It was, as I have already said, at the time when my mother
had a three months' leave from exile, which she was spending in

the house of her brother, and friends and relations were coming
from far and near to do her honour. It is inconceivable that Mr.

Nicholas B. should not have been of the number. The little child
a few months old he had taken up in his arms on the day of his

home-coming, after years of war and exile, was confessing her
faith in national salvation by suffering exile in her turn. I do

not know whether he was present on the very day of our departure.
I have already admitted that for me he is more especially the man

who in his youth had eaten roast dog in the depths of a gloomy
forest of snow-loaded pines. My memory cannot place him in any

remembered scene. A hooked nose, some sleek white hair, an
unrelated evanescent impression of a meagre, slight, rigid figure

militarily buttoned up to the throat, is all that now exists on
earth of Mr. Nicholas B.; only this vague shadow pursued by the

memory of his grandnephew, the last surviving human being, I
suppose, of all those he had seen in the course of his taciturn

life.
But I remember well the day of our departure back to exile. The

elongated, bizarre, shabby travelling-carriage with four
post-horses, standing before the long front of the house with its

eight columns, four on each side of the broad flight of stairs.
On the steps, groups of servants, a few relations, one or two

friends from the nearest neighbourhood, a perfect silence; on all
the faces an air of sober concentration; my grandmother, all in

black, gazing stoically; my uncle giving his arm to my mother
down to the carriage in which I had been placed already; at the

top of the flight my little cousin in a short skirt of a tartan
pattern with a deal of red in it, and like a small princess

attended by the women of her own household; the head gouvernante,
our dear, corpulent Francesca (who had been for thirty years in

the service of the B. family), the former nurse, now outdoor
attendant, a handsome peasant face wearing a compassionate

expression, and the good, ugly Mlle. Durand, the governess, with
her black eyebrows meeting over a short, thick nose, and a

complexion like pale-brown paper. Of all the eyes turned toward
the carriage, her good-natured eyes only were dropping tears, and

it was her sobbing voice alone that broke the silence with an
appeal to me: "N'oublie pas ton francais, mon cheri." In three

months, simply by playing with us, she had taught me not only to
speak French, but to read it as well. She was indeed an

excellent playmate. In the distance, half-way down to the great
gates, a light, open trap, harnessed with three horses in Russian

fashion, stood drawn up on one side, with the police captain of
the district sitting in it, the vizor of his flat cap with a red

band pulled down over his eyes.
It seems strange that he should have been there to watch our

going so carefully. Without wishing to treat with levity the
just timidites of Imperialists all the world over, I may allow

myself the reflection that a woman, practically condemned by the
doctors, and a small boy not quite six years old, could not be

regarded as seriously dangerous, even for the largest of
conceivable empires saddled with the most sacred of

responsibilities. And this good man I believe did not think so,
either.

I learned afterward why he was present on that day. I don't
remember any outward signs; but it seems that, about a month

before, my mother became so unwell that there was a doubt whether
she could be made fit to travel in the time. In this uncertainty

the Governor-General in Kiev was petitioned to grant her a
fortnight's extension of stay in her brother's house. No answer

whatever was returned to this prayer, but one day at dusk the
police captain of the district drove up to the house and told my

uncle's valet, who ran out to meet him, that he wanted to speak