Let us draw a veil over the unutterable sorrows of that parent pair, thus foully deprived of the beloved of their souls. Heaven alone has power to right wrongs such as these, and to the mercy and justice of heaven we must commend them. Let us follow Saul Isaac on the course which he was obliged to pursue. His experience was not at first different from that of thousands of others. He was taken to the convent of St. Sophia in the neighborhood of Moscow. There a thorough Russian and Christian education was given him, and every effort was made, by means of mingled kindness and severity, to induce him voluntarily to accept baptism, for even the perverted and tyrannical minds of his captors perceived that a compulsory administration of the rite could have no binding obligation upon the conscience. To be sure, their notions of voluntary action were rather remarkably casuistical. Severe beatings, periodical starvation, and longer or shorter terms of imprisonment were all considered legitimate forms of missionary effort with which to persuade the cantonists, as the abducted Hebrew children were called, of the superiority of Christianity to Judaism, and to induce them _voluntarily_ to accept it. It is a glorious tribute to the power of Jewish teachings that most of these helpless victims, despite their tender years and pitiful condition, were by no means quick to yield to the maltreatment or blandishments of their masters. Most of them resisted for years; some never yielded. Four years were required to bring our Saul Isaac into the frame of mind requisite for the acceptance of Christianity. At first he wept and wailed constantly and would touch no food except dry bread and water; and, young as he was, he refused to listen to the instruction of the Russian monks. But as the weeks rolled into months and the months into years, without seeing other than Gentile faces and without any word from his parents or any other Jews, gradually his recollections grew dimmer and his resolution weaker. Finally he no longer objected to the Christian instructions, and in his twelfth year he was baptized with great pomp and parade in the chapel of the monastery, receiving the name of Sergei Pavlowitz. From this time on his advancement was rapid. After three years of general education he decided to enter upon the military career, and in his fifteenth year he entered the Imperial Cadet School at St. Petersburg. The memory of his parents had quite faded from his mind; or if the thought of them ever came to him, they seemed like ghostly figures of an unreal world, entirely devoid of actuality or connection with his present existence.