inaudible on the thick carpet. But I heard the door of his study-bedroom
close. He was then sixty-two years old and had been for a quarter of
a century the wisest, the firmest, the most indulgent of guardians,
extending over me a paternal care and affection, a moral support which I
seemed to feel always near me in the most distant parts of the earth.

As to Mr. Nicholas B., sub-lieutenant of 1808, lieutenant of 1813 in
the French Army, and for a short time Officier d'Ordonnance of Marshal
Marmont; afterwards Captain in the 2nd Regiment of Mounted Rifles in
the Polish Army--such as it existed up to 1830 in the reduced kingdom
established by the Congress of Vienna--I must say that from all that
more distant past, known to me traditionally and a little de visu, and
called out by the words of the man just gone away, he remains the most
incomplete figure. It is obvious that I must have seen him in '64, for
it is certain that he would not have missed the opportunity of seeing my
mother for what he must have known would be the last time. From my early
boyhood to this day, if I try to call up his image, a sort of mist rises
before my eyes, a mist in which I perceive vaguely only a neatly brushed
head of white hair (which is exceptional in the case of the B. family,
where it is the rule for men to go bald in a becoming manner, before
thirty) and a thin, curved, dignified nose, a feature in strict
accordance with the physical tradition of the B. family. But it is not
by these fragmentary remains of perishable mortality that he lives in my
memory. I knew, at a very early age, that my grand-uncle Nicholas B. was
a Knight of the Legion of Honour and that he had also the Polish Cross
for valour Virtuti Militari. The knowledge of these glorious facts
inspired in me an admiring veneration; yet it is not that sentiment,
strong as it was, which resumes for me the force and the significance
of his personality. It is overborne by another and complex impression
of awe, compassion and horror. Mr. Nicholas B. remains for me the