It does not fall to the lot of many to live in a highly civilized town
and submit to open robbery. Prince Bukaty lived in a small palace in
the Kotzebue street, and when he took his morning stroll in the Cracow
Faubourg he passed under the shadow of a palace flying the Russian
flag, which palace was his, and had belonged to his ancestors from time
immemorial. He had once made the journey to St. Petersburg to see in
the great museum there the portraits of his fathers, the books that his
predecessors had collected, the relics of Poland's greatness, which were
his, and the greatness thereof was his.

"Yes," he answered to the loquacious curator, "I know. You tell me
nothing that I do not know. These things are mine. I am the Prince
Bukaty!"

And the curator of St. Petersburg went away, sorrowful, like the young
man who had great possessions.

For Russia had taken these things from the Bukatys, not in punishment,
but because she wanted them. She wanted offices for her bureaucrats on
the Krakowski Przedmiescie, in Warsaw, so she took Bukaty Palace. And to
whom can one appeal when Caesar steals?

Poland had appealed to Europe, and Europe had expressed the deepest
sympathy. And that was all!

The house in the Kotzebue had the air of an old French town-house, and
was, in fact, built by a French architect in the days of Stanislaus
Augustus, when Warsaw aped Paris. It stands back from the road behind
high railings, and, at the farther end of a paved court-yard, to which