"My sweet wife, who had never admired the great Captain as the Russian ladies did, prayed and wept and coaxed in vain; she brought my two children, the boy and the girl, to show me that I ought to think of more than mere abstractions. Innocent flesh of my own flesh, and tender bone of my own bone, and eyes more bright than any star in all the sky of glory, what had the 'Wolf of the mountains' done to make me love him more than these? I stood at the gate with my arm around her trembling form; and my beautiful boy, just three years old, clung to my leg and kissed my knee, and the little baby always wise, who now has come to be Dariel, looked at me through her mother's hair, with the sparkle of the brighter world babes come from still unquenched by earth. What was pride to me, or glory, if I could not find them here? But love has never yet sufficed to keep a man contented. He grows ashamed of living in it; and his manhood argues that if he lets his darlings wrap it all in warmth and softness, it will soon cease to be worth their care. I put my wife and children by, with a prayer to the Lord to protect them, and went to do my duty. "How often I looked back, and thought--as all I loved grew further off--that a man's first duty is to those who cannot live without him. Moreover, that I should be punished for casting eyes upon and longing for stirring rather than steadfast life. Badly begun, and sadly ended, was to be the rule of it. At the outset thus our little band (familiar as they once had been with every twist of the mountain-chain and every tangle of the gorges) had managed, by living in peace so long, to get their memories confused. And even when they hit upon the way, they found it stopped by Cossack outposts at the very points that we used to guard. But after many a climb and crawl, we contrived to rejoin the brave Imaum. "I was admitted to him at once, and saw by the weariness of his eyes, and the looseness of his attitude, that he knew it was all over. He was sitting at a table with the lamp behind him, and his shaggy head thrown backward, so that the light played down the furrows of his heavy forehead, as from below one sees the moon glistening down a wrinkled steep. With his usual scorn of ceremony he did not rise, but grasped my hand. "'Imar, thou art a man,' he said, with his guttural voice, such as all the Avars have, now a little tremulous. 'If all had been as true as thou, I should not look like this to-night. It is Russian gold that has conquered us. To-morrow I surrender.' "This was such a shock to me, that I could not reply immediately. Not that I cared for the cause of Islam, to which he had been devoted; neither did I detest the Russians, or dream that we, with so many races all at feud with one another, could ever form a nation. But I felt as any true man would feel, a reverence for this dauntless hero (who had held his own so long against resistless odds) and sorrow at the close of a career so grand.