revealed themselves at last as a long line of peasant carts full of soldiers, proceeding slowly in double file under the escort of mounted Cossacks.

It was like an immense reptile creeping over the fields; its head dipped out of sight in a slight hollow and its tail went on writhing and growing shorter as though the monster were eating its way into the very heart of the land.

The prince directed his way through a village lying a little off the track. The roadside inn with its stable, byre^* and barn all under one enormous thatched roof, resembled a deformed, hunchbacked, ragged giant, sprawling amongst the small huts of the peasants. The innkeeper, a portly, dignified Jew, clad in a black satin coat reaching down to his heels and girt with a red sash, stood at the door stroking his long, silvery beard.

He watched the prince approach and bowed gravely from the waist, not expecting to be noticed even, since it was well known that their young lord had no eyes for anything or anybody in his grief. It was quite a shock for him when the prince pulled up and asked: ‘What’s all this, Yankel?’

‘That, please your Serenity, that is a convoy of foot soldiers they are hurrying down to the south.’

He glanced right and left cautiously, but as there was no one near but some children playing in the dust of the village street, he came up close to the stirrup.

‘Doesn’t your Serenity know? It has begun already down there. All the landowners great and small are out in arms, and even the common people have risen. Only yesterday the saddler from Grodek’ (it was a tiny market-town near by) ‘went through here with his two apprentices on his way to join. He left even his cart with me. I gave him a guide through our neighbourhood. You know, your Serenity, our people, they travel a lot and they see all that’s going on, and they know all the roads.’

He tried to keep down his excitement, for the Jew Yankel, innkeeper and tenant of all the mills on the estate, was a Polish patriot. And in a still lower voice—

‘I was already a married man when the French and all the other nations passed this way with Napoleon.^* Tse! Tse! That was a great harvest for death. Nu! Perhaps this time God will help.’

The prince nodded. ‘Perhaps’—and falling into deep meditation he let his horse take him home.

That night he wrote a letter, and early in the morning sent a mounted express to the post town. During the day he came out of his taciturnity, to the great joy of the family circle, and conversed with his father of recent events—the revolt in Warsaw, the flight of the Grand duke Constantine,^* the first slight successes of the Polish army (at that time there was a Polish army), the rising in the provinces. Old Prince John, moved and uneasy, speaking from a purely aristocratic point of view, mistrusted the popular origins of the movement, regretted its democratic tendencies, and did not believe in the possibility of success.

He was sad, inwardly agitated.

‘I am judging all this calmly. There are secular principles of legitimacy and order which have been violated in this reckless enterprise for the sake of subversive illusions. Though, of course, the patriotic impulses of the heart …’

Prince Roman had listened in a thoughtful attitude. He took advantage of the pause to tell his father quietly that he had sent that morning a letter to St Petersburg resigning his commission in the Guards.

The old prince remained silent. He thought that he ought to have been consulted. His son was also ordonnance officer to the Emperor,^* and he knew that the Tzar^* would never forget this appearance of defection in a Polish noble. In a discontented tone he pointed out to his son that as it was he had an unlimited leave. The right thing would have been to keep quiet. They had too much tact at court to