Let me take leave of you; I would go back to my people. I came hither in the belief that I should find here brave men ready for battle; who, at the appointed hour, would range themselves in fighting order, and declare war upon their oppressors as do we, who fight in open battle--as do we who, in open and honorable warfare, settle on whose side is the right. Such I thought to find here. On my journey hither, on the way from Warsaw to the Niemen, my predecessor, glorious Valerian Lukasinski, was being conveyed before me--he whom treachery had given over to the authorities. He was my relative, friend, and leader--trebly dear to me. He had been subjected to every species of physical and mental torture in order to make him reveal the aims of and participators in the conspiracy. They had not succeeded in drawing a word out of him. Constantine himself took the knout from the executioner's hands, and taught him how to use the agonizing implement. When Lukasinski was wellnigh flayed to death, no sign of humanity left in him, only one mass of bleeding flesh and bones and gaping wounds, the viceroy had him laid bound on a gun-carriage, and had this still breathing, bleeding mass dragged to his captivity through the rigor of mid-winter. I followed his track guided by the drops of blood which fell on the snow. Those frozen drops I gathered up one by one on the way, and placed them in a reliquary. Heaven had compassion on the sufferer; he died on the road. They made a hole in the ice of the river Niemen, and threw the body in; the current carried it off to the sea. I know that I shall follow him, and that my end will be like his. Still that knowledge neither moves me from fear or revengeful feeling to lie in ambush and murderously strike my ruler in the back at any time, when he may be sleeping, or kneeling in prayer! Our God was never a God of murder. The dagger which struck down Cæsar but opened the door to Caligula and Heliogabalus. While William Tell told Gessler to his face, 'With this arrow I will kill you. Defend yourself as best you can!' I do likewise. When the time comes I will declare war upon my enemies, and if God is with me, I shall destroy them; but as long as I do not feel myself strong enough to engage in open warfare, no oppression, no cruelty, and no fantastic ravings shall lead me, by any untimely revolt, to draw the cord tighter, which I fain would loose. Your plans are untimely, unripe, without sufficient basis; they destroy, but do not build up again. I know them, and will not unite our cause to yours. Let me go." Pestel, seizing the Pole by the hand, held him back.