She was seventeen, a type of rare Polish beauty, and the handsome,
dashing Russian officer at once fell madly in love with her. The parents
of the girl, however, were horrified at the notion of marrying their
daughter to a "Muscovite savage," and her father threatened her with his
curse if ever again she held communication with her lover. So the matter
was secretly arranged between the two, and during a ball which the young
Polish beauty was attending she suddenly disappeared. Outside the house
the lover waited with his sledge. They sped away, and were married at
the first church they reached.

The bride, with her father's curse upon her, passed straight from her
sheltered existence in her luxurious home to all the unsparing rigours
of Russian camp-life. Bred in an atmosphere of maternal tenderness and
Polish refinement she had now to share the life of her rough, uncultured
Russian husband, to content herself with the shallow society of the
wives of the camp officers, and soon to be crushed by the knowledge that
the man for whom she had sacrificed everything was not even faithful
to her.

During their travels, in 1821, Nicholas Nekrassov the future poet was
born, and three years later his father left military service and settled
in his estate in the Yaroslav Province, on the banks of the great river
Volga, and close to the Vladimirsky highway, famous in Russian history
as the road along which, for centuries, chained convicts had been driven
from European Russia to the mines in Siberia. The old park of the manor,
with its seven rippling brooklets and mysterious shadowy linden avenues
more than a century old, filled with a dreamy murmur at the slightest
stir of the breeze, stretched down to the mighty Volga, along the banks
of which, during the long summer days, were heard the piteous, panting
songs of the _burlaki_, the barge-towers, who drag the heavy, loaded