uilt on raised ground, the farm-house was of stone. It had been a
plain, square building; but in the days of Poniatowski some attempt
had been made at ornamentation in the French style. A pavilion had been
built in the garden amid the pine-trees. A sun-dial had been placed on
the lawn, which was now no longer a lawn, but had lapsed again into a
meadow. The cows had polished the sun-dial with their rough sides,
while the passage of cold winters and wet springs had left the plaster
ornamentation mossy and broken.

Here, amid a simple people, the Bukatys spent a portion of the year.
They usually came in the winter, because it was in the winter they were
needed. The feudal spirit, which was strong in the old prince and
weaker in his children, has two sides to it; but its enemies have only
remembered one. The prince took it as a matter of course that it was his
duty to care for his peasants, and relieve as far as lay in his power
the distress which came upon them annually with the regularity of the
recurring seasons. With a long winter and a wet spring, with a heavy
taxation, and a standing bill at the village shop kept by a Jew, and the
village inn kept by another, these peasants never had any money. And
so far as human foresight can perceive, there seems to be no reason why
they ever should.

By some chain of reasoning, which assuredly had a flaw in it, the prince
seemed to have arrived at the conclusion that he was put into the world
to help his peasants, and those who were now no longer his serfs. And,
though he spoke to them as if they were of a different creation and
not his equals--as the French Revolution set about to prove, but only
succeeded in proving the contrary--he cared for their bodies as he would
have cared for a troop of sheep. He only saw that they were hungry, and
he fed them. Wanda only saw that there were among them sick who could
not pay for a doctor, and could not have gone to the expense of obeying
his orders had they called one in. She only saw that there were mothers
who had to work in the fields, while their children died of infantine
and comparatively simple complaints at home, because their rightful
nurse could not spare the time to nurse them. It was no wonder that the
roof of the farm-house leaked, and that the cows were invited to feed
upon the front lawn.

Clad in a sheepskin coat, with great jack-boots flapping above his
knees, the prince spent all his days on horseback, riding from house