isregarded by one in some dark hour of life.

"One afternoon, it happened that the Prince after turning his horse's
head for home remarked a low dense cloud of dark dust cutting off
slantwise a part of the view. He reined in on a knoll and peered.
There were slender gleams of steel here and there in that cloud, and it
contained moving forms which revealed themselves at last as a long line
of peasant carts full of soldiers, moving 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 slowly 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 under one
enormous thatched roof resembled a deformed, hunch-backed, 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 is, please your Serenity, that is a convoy of footsoldiers 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
pas