Then suddenly, as it were, across all the steppe and through Perekop, came to me the voice, "I see." In the distance something began to seem hazy; the heavens and the air ran together; out of this came a woman with a sweet face and stood near me. The fire ceased to burn me; the rawhide whistled above me no more, and I felt that I was flying, borne on the hand of that woman. With her was a legion of angels singing, "Not in a kontush and with a sabre, but in wounds, O knight, knight manful in battle, enduring in torture! O Paladin of Christ, faithful son of the bloody land! Welcome to peace! welcome to happiness! welcome to joy!" And so we flew onward to heaven, and what I saw there my sinful lips cannot utter to mortal ears. CHAPTER V. A wagon squeaks under me, and a fresh, cool breeze blows around. I open my eyes; I see not Kizlich, but a steppe,--a steppe like the sea. Then I close my lids, thinking that a dream is presenting some puppet-show before me. I look again; I see the old face of Kimek, Pan Tvoryanski's house-steward, and behind him a number of attendants. "Praise be to God," he says, "you have recovered!" I ask whither I am going. "To the Commonwealth." "I am free?" "Free." "Who ransomed me?" "The young lady." When he said "young lady," something like an immense weeping burst forth from my breast. I stretched out my hands; I fainted. When I came to myself a day later, a wagon was squeaking beneath me, and Kimek told all. Behold, Pan Tvoryanski had been transferred from this wretched world to a better one, leaving Marysia his heiress; she was living with her uncle, a bishop. Tidings of my misery, my torments and tortures, reached them; then she, falling at her uncle's feet, acknowledged her love, and, with his permission, ransomed me from Sukyman's power. Kimek did not find the Khan in Kizlich. When the plague passed he went to a place called Eupatoria; and Sukyman, thinking me dead, sold what was left of me for three hundred gold ducats. Kimek also thought that he would be more likely to take me home dead, for I took no note of God's world for two weeks; still the Lord restored life to me. Hearing all this, and understanding that I was ransomed from pagan captivity at the instance of my maiden, I wept earnestly, and made this vow in my soul to love that compassionate maiden and guard her during my lifetime. It seemed to me then that my stay in the Crimea, my captivity with Sukyman, and the tortures which I had suffered were a dream. Providence so orders the things of this life that in time everything passes and remains only in memory, with this difference, however, that the harsher the happenings the pleasanter it is to remember them. So that not only past labors, but sorrows become joyous.