This appeal was an unlucky inspiration.  In crowding clumsily to the window to see whether he was speaking the truth, the fellows overturned the little writing-table.  As it fell over a chink of loose coin was heard.  “There’s money in that thing,” cried the blacksmith.  In a moment the top of the delicate piece of furniture was smashed and there lay exposed in a drawer eighty half-imperials.  Gold coin was a rare sight in Russia even at that time; it put the peasants beside themselves.  “There must be more of that in the house and we shall have it,” yelled the ex-soldier blacksmith.  “This is war time.”  The others were already shouting out of the window urging the crowd to come back and help.  The priest, abandoned suddenly at the gate, flung his arms up and hurried away so as not to see what was going to happen.

In their search for money that bucolic mob smashed everything in the house, ripping with knives, splitting with hatchets, so that, as the servant said, there were no two pieces of wood holding together left in the whole house.  They broke some very fine mirrors, all the windows and every piece of glass and china.  They threw the books and papers out on the lawn and set fire to the heap for the mere fun of the thing apparently.  Absolutely the only one solitary thing which they left whole was a small ivory crucifix, which remained hanging on the wall in the wrecked bedroom above a wild heap of rags, broken mahogany and splintered boards which had been Mr. Nicholas B.’s bedstead.  Detecting the servant in the act of stealing away with a japanned tin box, they tore it from him, and because he resisted they threw him out of the dining-room window.  The house was on one floor but raised well above the ground, and the fall was so serious that the man remained lying stunned till the cook and a stable-boy ventured forth at dusk from their hiding-places and picked him up.  By that time the mob had departed carrying off the tin box, which they supposed to be full of paper money.  Some distance from the house in the middle of a field they broke it open.  They found inside documents engrossed on parchment and the two crosses of the Legion of Honour and For Valour.  At the sight of these objects, which, the blacksmith explained, were marks of honour given only by the Tsar, they became extremely frightened at what they had done.  They threw the whole lot away into a ditch and dispersed hastily.

On learning of this particular loss Mr. Nicholas B. broke down completely.  The mere sacking of his house did not seem to affect him much.  While he was still in bed from the shock the two crosses were found and returned to him.  It helped somewhat his slow convalescence, but the tin box and the parchments, though searched for in all the ditches around, never turned up again.  He could not get over the loss of his Legion of Honour Patent, whose preamble, setting forth his services, he knew by heart to the very letter, and after this blow volunteered sometimes to recite, tears standing in his eyes the while.  Its terms haunted him apparently during the last two years of his life to such an extent that he used to repeat them to himself.  This is confirmed by the remark made more than once by his old servant to the more intimate friends.  “What makes my heart heavy is to hear our master in his room at night walking up and down and praying aloud in the French language.”