But it was just that very childhood which was so bewildering to her own mind. She recollected the isolated hamlet somewhere in the South, in a desert, the large shady trees, the low cottage, the kitchen garden, and beyond, the boundless fields. A good, kind old woman dressed and took care of her. Then came the journey in the comfortably balanced cart, filled with fresh, perfumed hay, other boundless fields, rivers, mountains, forests. “But who am I?” she would cry in anguish, sobbing and striking her poor senseless head! “They want proofs!--but where are these to be found? What can I add to what I have already said? How can I myself separate the truth from the fiction which life has mixed up together? And how could a poor, weak, deserted, helpless child know that one day she would be called to account for her own birth? The judgment concerning me is unjust, illegal. It’s not for me to help to convince my persecutors. Let them disgrace me; let them hunt me down; let them finish their work; I am not answerable, either for my birth, or for my name.… I am the only living witness of my past; there is no other. Why are they so furious? God does many wonders. Is it possible that He, to avenge a poor, persecuted creature, will not perform a miracle, will not open the door of this stone coffin, of this awful fatal dungeon?” CHAPTER XXV. _FATHER PETER ANDRÉEF._ The last warm days of autumn had already passed, and cold and gloomy November had brought its rains and mists. Father Peter Andréef, the high priest of the Cathedral of Kazan, was a man in the prime of life, highly educated and well read. In the autumn of 1775 he was expecting from Tchernigoff, his niece and god-daughter Vâra. She had written to her uncle, that she would arrive in Petersburg with a companion, a young lady, who was coming in the hope of presenting personally to the empress a petition on a very important subject. The little house of Father Peter, with an _entresol_,[45] and a _perron_ standing out in the street, was built behind the cathedral, and stood by the side of the palace of the Hetman, Razoumovski. The old oaks and the lindens threw their shade over its red-tiled roof, even extending their wide-spreading branches over the priest’s little yard.