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274 up our souls. Warden, thou wilt forgive me; I must die!"

"There is merit in refusing to betray your country, though your own people proclaim you a traitor! Especially for a man who had such pride as mine!

"The name of traitor clove to me like a pestilence. The neighbours turned their faces from me, my former friends fled from me, the timid greeted me from afar and turned aside; even a mere peasant boor or a Jew, though he bowed, would, as he passed by, smite me with a sneering laugh. The word 'traitor' rang in my ears and echoed through my house and over my fields; that word from morn till dark hovered before me like a spot before a sick man's eye. And yet I was not a traitor to my country.

The Muscovites showed by acts of violence that they regarded me as one of their partisans: they gave the Soplicas a considerable part of the dead man's estates; later the Targowica confederates wished to bestow an office upon me. If I had then consented to turn Muscovite!—Satan counselled it—I was already influential and rich; but if I had become a Muscovite?—The foremost magnates would have sought my favour; even my brother gentlemen—even the mob, which is so ready to disparage those of its own number, is prone to forgive those happier men who serve the Muscovites! I knew this, and yet—I could not.

"I fled from my country! Where have I not been! what have I not suffered!

"At last God deigned to reveal to me the one true