“We may try it,” answered the Zaporogean, “but we must promise this, that the one of us who survives the other shall offer a prayer for the other’s soul.” “That is agreed,” I said, and gave him my hand, for it seemed as if through misfortune I had found in this shaggy-bearded barbarian a friend and a brother. He helped me up and at daybreak we fell into the long line of stragglers and wounded that silently tottered into Poltava to give themselves up as prisoners. They willingly tried to conceal the Zaporogean among the rest. His big boots with their flaps reached up to his hips and his coat-tails hung down to his spurs. As soon as a Cossack looked at him, he turned to one of us and cried with raised voice the only Swedish words he had come to learn in the campaign: “I Shwede, Devil-damn!” My Zaporogean and I with eight of my comrades were assigned quarters in the upper story of a big stone house. As we two had come up there first, we picked out for ourselves a little separate cubby-hole with a window on an alley. There was nothing else there than a little straw to lie on, but I had in my coat a tin flute, which I had from a fallen Kalmuck at Starodub, and on which I had taught myself to play a few pretty psalms. With that I shortened the time, and soon we noticed that, as often as I played, a young woman came to the window on the other side of the alley. Possibly for that reason I played more than I should have otherwise cared to and I know not rightly whether she was fairer and more seemly than all other women, or whether long sojourn among men had made my eye less accustomed, but I had great joy in beholding her. However, I never looked at her when she turned her face toward our window, because I have always been bashful before women-folk and have never rightly understood how to conduct myself in that which pertains to them. Never, too, have I sought fellowship with men who go with their heads full of wenches and do nothing but hanker after gallant intrigues. “Let everyone keep his vessel in holiness,” Paul saith, “and not in the lust of desire as do the heathen, which know not God; also let no one in this matter dishonor and wrong his brother, because the Lord is a powerful avenger in all such things.” I recognized, however, that a man should at all times bear himself courteously and fittingly, and as one arm of my coat was in tatters, I always turned that side inward when I played. She usually sat with arms crossed above the window-sill, and her hands were round and white, though large. She had a scarlet-colored bodice with silver buttons and many chains. An old witch who often stood beneath her window with a wheel-barrow and sold bread covered with jam called her Feodosova.