ut they seemed less beautiful and
not so large as of old. And the same portraits hung upon the walls. Here
Kosciuszko,4 in his Cracow coat,5 with his eyes raised to heaven, held his
two-handed sword; such was he when on the steps of the altar he swore that
with this sword he would drive the three powers from Poland or himself
would fall upon it. Farther on sat Rejtan,6 in Polish costume, mourning
the loss of liberty; in his hands he held a knife with the point turned
against his breast, and before him lay _Phaedo_ and _The Life of Cato_.
Still farther on Jasinski,7 a fair and melancholy youth, and his faithful
comrade Korsak8 stand side by side on the entrenchments of Praga, on heaps
of Muscovites, hewing down the enemies of their country--but around them
Praga is already burning.

He recognised even the tall old musical clock in its wooden case near the
chamber door, and with childish joy he pulled at the string, in order to
hear Dombrowski's old mazurka.71

He ran about the whole house and searched for the room that had been his
own when he was a child, ten years before. He entered, drew back, and
surveyed the walls with astonished eyes: could this room be a woman's
lodgings? Who could live here? His old uncle was unmarried, and his aunt
had dwelt for years in St. Petersburg. Could that be the housekeeper's
chamber? A piano? On it music and books; all abandoned in careless
confusion: sweet disorder!

Not old could the hands have been that had so abandoned them! There too, a
white gown, freshly taken from the hook to put on, was spread upon the arm
of a chair. In the windows were pots of fragrant flowers: geraniums,
asters, gillyflowers, and violets. The traveller stepped to one of the
windows--a new marvel was before him. On the bank of the brook, in a spot
once overgrown with nettles, was a tiny garden intersected by paths, full
of clumps of English grass and of mint. The slender wooden fence,
fashioned into a monogram, shone with ribbons of gay daisies. Evidently
the beds had but just been sprinkled; there stood the tin watering-pot
full of water, but the fair gardener could nowhere be seen. She had only
now departed; the little gate, freshly touched, was still trembling; near
the gate could be seen on the sand the print of a small foot that had been
without shoe or stocking--on the fine dry sand, white as snow; the print
was clear but light; you guessed that it was left in quick running by the
tiny feet of some o