y weary--a vanquished man. That act of destruction
affected me profoundly by its air of surrender. Not before death,
however. To a man of such strong faith death could not have been an
enemy.

For many years I believed that every scrap of his writings had been
burnt, but in July of 1914 the Librarian of the University of Cracow
calling on me during our short visit to Poland, mentioned the existence
of a few manuscripts of my father and especially of a series of letters
written before and during his exile to his most intimate friend who had
sent them to the University for preservation. I went to the Library at
once, but had only time then for a mere glance. I intended to come back
next day and arrange for copies being made of the whole correspondence.
But next day there was war. So perhaps I shall never know now what he
wrote to his most intimate friend in the time of his domestic happiness,
of his new paternity, of his strong hopes--and later, in the hours of
disillusion, bereavement and gloom.

I had also imagined him to be completely forgotten forty-five years
after his death. But this was not the case. Some young men of letters
had discovered him, mostly as a remarkable translator of Shakespeare,
Victor Hugo and Alfred de Vigny, to whose drama _Chatterton_, translated
by himself, he had written an eloquent Preface defending the poet's deep
humanity and his ideal of noble stoicism. The political side of his life
was being recalled too; for some men of his time, his co-workers in the
task of keeping the national spirit firm in the hope of an independent
future, had been in their old age publishing their memoirs, where the
part he played was for the first time publicly disclosed to the world. I
learned then of things in his life I never knew before, things which
outside the group of the initiated could have been known to no living
being except my mother. It was thus that from a volume of posthumous
memoirs dealing with those bitter years I learned the fact that the
first inception of the secret National Committee intended primarily to
organize moral resistance to the augmented pressure of Russianism arose
on my father's initiative, and that its first meetings were held in our
Warsaw house, of which all I remember distinctly is one room, white and
crimson, probably the drawing room. In one of its walls there was the
loftiest of all archways. Where it led to remains a mystery, but to this
day I cannot get rid of the beli