"The Russian plan was to press us hard, throughout the summer and autumnal months, with ten men perhaps to every one of ours; to encourage us most benevolently to sow our land and tend it, and then to rejoice and renew their strength with the pithy marrow of our corn, and the juicy fibre of our flocks and herds. A man loves his country on the very same principle on which he loves his mother; but if he can never taste what she is like, he might just as well have a step-mother. Neither was this the only loss of satisfaction year by year. Our men, as I have heard them tell, when I was old enough to join them, felt even worse than their own privations the rich gain of the enemy. To sit on a rock, just out of shot--as many a dauntless Avar told me--with glacier water for his drink, and nothing but mast on his tattered lap, and to see a hundred fat round fellows, who had come into his land quite lean, laughing and joking at his own door, with the milk of his best cow at their lips, and the kids of his flock coming up to them in sniffs from the fires where they were roasting, this he assured me--and I could quite believe him--turned his empty digestion into bile, and the love of his native land into a hollow ache. And this very feeling, in a higher form, cost my dear father his valiant life, and left me and my sister orphans. "You may have heard of the defeat and slaughter of an entire Russian column, under the great Prince Dorougoff, which our gallant mountain forces, with my father second in command, accomplished most effectually. Everybody knows what glory and renown accrued to the stout Imaum through this; but all of our men who were present declared that my father deserved the main credit. The Emperor of Russia had grown impatient, and sent impetuous orders that his army should advance at once into the heart of the defiles, and crush the rebellion--as he dared to call it, though we never had been his subjects--at one mighty blow, and for ever. The Commander replied that he would march His Majesty's army in, but never would march it out again. And according to that answer, so it was. Our men became tired of slaughter, although they had many a long year of suffering to avenge.