On one side were three beautiful young women, the same, I doubted not, who a little before had filled the air with groans and supplications while their clothes were being torn off them, in order to exhibit their charms to purchasers. They were still half nude, their feet bare, plastered with chalk[29] and fastened by rings to a long iron bar. Huddled close together, these three held one another in such close embrace that two of them, still crushed down with shame, hid their faces in the bosom of the third. The latter, pale and somber, hung her head, letting her disheveled black hair fall before her bruised and naked breast--bruised no doubt in the vain struggle against the keepers who disrobed her. A short distance from them, two little children, three or four years old, bound around their waists merely by a light cord fastened to a stake, laughed and played in the straw with the heedlessness common to their age. The children evidently did not belong to either of the three women. At the other side of the stall I saw a matron of the noble carriage of my mother Margarid. Manacles were on her wrists, shackles on her ankles. She was standing, leaning against a beam to which she was chained by the waist. She stood still as a statue; her grey hair disordered, her eyes fixed, her face livid and fearful. Time and again she gave vent to a burst of threatening and crazy laughter. Finally, at the rear of the stall, was a cage resembling the one which I myself had occupied. In that cage, if what the "horse-dealer" said was true, would be my two children. Tears filled my eyes. In spite of my weakness, the thought of my children, so close to me, caused a flush of warmth to rise to my face--a symptom of my returning powers. And now, Sylvest, my son, you for whom I write this report, read slowly what is now about to follow. Aye, read slowly, to the end that every word may imbue your soul with its indelible hatred for the Romans--a hatred that I feel certain must some day, the day of vengeance, break out with terrific force. Read, my son, and you will understand how your mother, after having given life to you and your sister, after having heaped all her tenderness upon you, could in the end give you no stronger proof of her maternal love than by endeavoring to kill you, to the end that she might carry you hence, to return to life in the other world at her side and in the circle of our family. Alas! You survived her foresight! This, my son, is what happened!