“Russia owes me twenty years of happiness and twenty million rubles,” the old prince was in the habit of saying, and each year on the anniversary of his wife's death he reckoned up afresh this debt. He mentioned it, moreover, to Russian and Pole alike, with that calm frankness which was somehow misunderstood, for the administration never placed him among the suspects. Poland has always been a plain-speaking country, and the Poles, expressing themselves in the roughest of European tongues, a plain-spoken people. They spoke so plainly to Henry of Valois when he was their king that one fine night he ran away to mincing France and gentler men. When, under rough John Sobieski, they spoke with their enemy in the gate of Vienna, their meaning was quite clear to the Moslem understanding. The Prince Bukaty had a touch of that rough manner which commands respect in this smooth age, and even Russian officials adopted a conciliatory attitude towards this man, who had known Poland without one of their kind within her boundaries. “You cannot expect an old man such as I to follow all the changes of your petty laws, and to remember under which form of government he happens to be living at the moment!” he had boldly said to a great personage from St. Petersburg, and the observation was duly reported in the capital. It was, moreover, said in Warsaw that the law had actually stretched a point or two for the Prince Bukaty on more than one occasion. Like many outspoken people, he passed for a barker and not a biter. It does not fall to the lot of many to live in a highly civilized town and submit to open robbery. Prince Bukaty lived in a small palace in the Kotzebue street, and when he took his morning stroll in the Cracow Faubourg he passed under the shadow of a palace flying the Russian flag, which palace was his, and had belonged to his ancestors from time immemorial. He had once made the journey to St. Petersburg to see in the great museum there the portraits of his fathers, the books that his predecessors had collected, the relics of Poland's greatness, which were his, and the greatness thereof was his. “Yes,” he answered to the loquacious curator, “I know. You tell me nothing that I do not know. These things are mine. I am the Prince Bukaty!” And the curator of St. Petersburg went away, sorrowful, like the young man who had great possessions. For Russia had taken these things from the Bukatys, not in punishment, but because she wanted them. She wanted offices for her bureaucrats on the Krakowski Przedmiescie, in Warsaw, so she took Bukaty Palace. And to whom can one appeal when Caesar steals? Poland had appealed to Europe, and Europe had expressed the deepest sympathy. And that was all!