to her by her mother. The grim years of 1860 and 1861 had worn out this
lady, who found the peace that passeth man's understanding while Poland
was yet in the horrors of a hopeless guerilla warfare.

"Russia owes me twenty years of happiness and twenty million rubles,"
the old prince was in the habit of saying, and each year on the
anniversary of his wife's death he reckoned up afresh this debt. He
mentioned it, moreover, to Russian and Pole alike, with that calm
frankness which was somehow misunderstood, for the administration never
placed him among the suspects. Poland has always been a plain-speaking
country, and the Poles, expressing themselves in the roughest of
European tongues, a plain-spoken people. They spoke so plainly to Henry
of Valois when he was their king that one fine night he ran away to
mincing France and gentler men. When, under rough John Sobieski, they
spoke with their enemy in the gate of Vienna, their meaning was quite
clear to the Moslem understanding.

The Prince Bukaty had a touch of that rough manner which commands
respect in this smooth age, and even Russian officials adopted a
conciliatory attitude towards this man, who had known Poland without one
of their kind within her boundaries.

"You cannot expect an old man such as I to follow all the changes of
your petty laws, and to remember under which form of government he
happens to be living at the moment!" he had boldly said to a great
personage from St. Petersburg, and the observation was duly reported in
the capital. It was, moreover, said in Warsaw that the law had actually
stretched a point or two for the Prince Bukaty on more than one
occasion. Like many outspoken people, he passed for a barker and not a
biter.