In the mean time, Poles who have passed through years of exile into a second freedom are coming to be known as a class apart, with qualities and virtues of their own--the growth of suffering and experience acting on a sensitive and poetic frame. These men are known as the Siberians. A Pole with whom I travel some days is one of these Siberians, and from his lips I hear another side of this strange story of exile life. CHAPTER XLIV. THE SIBERIANS. "He is one of the Siberians," says my comrade of the road, after quoting some verses from a Polish poet. "One of the Siberians?" "Yes," replies the Pole. "In these countries you find a people of whom the world has scarcely heard; a new people, I might say; for, while in physique they are like the fighting men who followed Sobieski to the walls of Vienna, they are in mind akin to the patient and laborious monks who have built up the shrines of Solovetsk. Time has done his work upon them. A sad and sober folk, they go among us by the name of our Siberians." "They are Poles by birth?" "Yes, Poles by genius and by birth. They are our children who have passed through fire; our children whom we never hoped to see in the living world. Once they were called our Lost Ones. In Poland we have a tragic phrase, much used by parting friends: 'We never meet again!' For many years that parting phrase was fate. An exile, sent beyond the Ural Mountains, never came back; he was said to have joined our Lost Ones; he became to us a memory like the dead. We could not hope to see his face again, except in dreams. To-day that line is but a song, a recollection of the past; a refrain sung by the waters of Babylon. In Vilna, in Kazan, in Kief, in a hundred cities widely parted from each other, you will find a colony of Poles, now happy in their homes, who have crossed and recrossed those heights; men of high birth, and of higher culture than their birth; men who have ploughed through the snows of Tomsk; who have brought back into the West a pure and bruised, though not a broken spirit." "Are these pardoned men reconciled to the Emperor?" "They are reconciled to God. Do not mistake me. No one doubts that the reigning Emperor is a good and brave man; high enough to see his duty; strong enough to face it, even though his feet should have to stumble long and often on the rocks. But God is over all, and his Son died for all. Alexander is but an instrument in His hands. You think me mystical! Because my countrymen believe in the higher powers, they are described by Franks, who believe in nothing, as dreamers and spiritualists. We dream our dreams, we see our signs, we practise our religion, we respect our clergy, we obey our God." "I have heard the Poles described as women in prayer, as gods in battle!"