The boy could hear the heavy bolt being drawn. By the time he had crept fearfully downstairs it was all over. His father was gone. His sister and his aunt were sobbing in each other’s arms. He ran into the courtyard. “Where is my father? What have you done with him?” he asked one of the soldiers. When the man ignored him, he tugged at his coat and cried, “Where are you taking my father?” A stinging pain shot along his cheek as the Russian whirled and struck at him with a knout. “Let go of my coat, you Polish brat!” the man half snarled and half laughed. He called out some orders to his men, and the troop clattered down the road and out of the boy’s sight. The boy raised his hand to his smarting cheek. The Cossack rope had ripped across it like a firebrand, and the fire had burned itself into his soul. Young Ignace Paderewski was only four years old on the night the Russian soldiers took his father to prison for a year. Jan Paderewski had been accused of plotting the overthrow of his Imperial Majesty, Alexander II, Emperor of all the Russias. What Jan Paderewski had actually done was to allow firearms to be stored in his basement until such time as they might be useful. But besides getting him arrested and imprisoned, they had actually accomplished very little. The revolution of 1863 and 1864 was just one more in a succession of uprisings by which the Polish people struck back at their oppressors. None of these unhappy revolts had ever won back the country’s lost freedom, but they kept alive the fierce pride of the Polish people, a pride that the rulers of three nations had tried for nearly a hundred years to extinguish. [Illustration: “_Where are you taking my father?_”] Poland, as a nation, no longer existed. The ancient Catholic kingdom had been swallowed up by three hungry neighbors: Germany, Austria, and Russia. It had not, therefore, been swallowed whole, but in pieces. Three times—in 1772, in 1793, in 1795—the three royal butchers had met over a map of Poland and thought up new ways of dividing the country to their mutual satisfaction. To their distaste they found the Polish people did not agree with their selfish plans.