“Who shall see that day?” he murmured sadly. “Not the old; their work is quickly over, while God’s work goes on but slowly. No, not the old; they are content to lie down in hope, waiting for what God will let them see in the resurrection morning. But the young.--He is young yet, this Czar God has given us, whose youthful dreams are not of pleasure, or conquest, or glory, but of loosing the heavy burdens, letting the oppressed go free, and breaking every yoke. Shall it be given to him to see the desire of his heart? It may be--before his hairs are white as mine. But it may not. I have heard the priests say that, after all, it was not Moses who led the children of Israel into the Promised Land.” Ivan and Feodor waited in respectful silence until his reverie was over. Then Ivan began to question him upon a subject about which he was interested, and indeed perplexed. “Dädushka, why do you seem to think the Czar ought not to have made this peace with Napoleon for which all the bells in the city have been ringing?” “There be many reasons, boy--good reasons and bad, noble reasons and selfish. Of the selfish reasons I need not tell you. You are now surrounded by merchants; you will soon be surrounded by nobles. No doubt you will hear lamentations enough from both--for the luxuries wherewith English commerce supplied the tables of the one, and the gold with which it filled the purses of the other. But what, perhaps, you will never hear, is the truth that lies buried beneath that stream of idle talk. Have you ever, in Nicolofsky, listened on winter nights to the low howling of the wolves amidst the snow? There is a horrible story I remember hearing in my childhood about a woman--a mother--who was making a winter journey in her sledge with her five little ones. Perhaps you too know the tale? The famished pack with their demon voices howled around her sledge. To save all the rest, as she fondly dreamed, she sacrificed one child, her youngest. Then a moment of respite, a verst or two gained upon the savage pursuers--a wild, fleeting gleam of hope. Then--_then_;--but I need not go on. She reached her journey’s end alone, to die the next day, accursed and broken-hearted.[12] Forget the story if you can, but remember the awful lesson. The taste for blood grows with what it feeds on, and the doom of the coward only comes the more quickly from his guilty efforts to avert it. The French are wolves, and Napoleon is a demon. Already has he devoured the nations of Germany, and it has but whetted his appetite for fresh victims. He deceives the Czar--who is young, and likes to think others as true and generous as himself--with his offers of peace. But the peace he offers is only from the lip out; for he hates us, and he will never cease to hate us. Why not? We stand upright, while the other nations--all except the English--bow down and kiss his feet. But they are all infidels, those Frenchmen. They believe neither in God, nor saint, nor devil.