So long as the frost holds, the country is endurable; nay, it is better than the towns on those great plains of eastern Europe; but when the thaw comes, and each small depression is a puddle, every low-lying field a pond, and whole plains become lakes, few remain in the villages who can set their feet upon the pavement.  The early spring, so closely associated in most minds with the song of birds and the budding of green things, is in Poland and Russia a period of waiting for the water to drain off the flat land; a time to look to one’s thickest top-boots in these countries, where men and women are booted to the knee, and every third house displays the shoemaker’s sign upon its door-post.

The Bukatys’ country-house, like all else that the past had left them, was insignificant.  In olden days it had been a farm, one of the smallest, used once or twice during the winter as a shooting-lodge; for it stood in the midst of vast forests.  It was not really ancient, for it had been built in the days of Sobieski, when that rough warrior and parvenu king built himself the house in the valley of the Vistula, where he saw all his greatness vanish, and ended his days in that grim solitude which is the inheritance of master-minds.  The hand of the French architect is to be detected even in this farm; for Poland, more frankly and consciously than the rest of the world, drew all her inspiration and her art from France.  Did not France once send her a king?  Was not Sobieski’s wife a Frenchwoman, who, moreover, ruled that great fighter with her little finger, stronger than any rod of iron?  If ever a Frenchman was artificially made from other racial materials, he was the last king of Poland, Stanislas Augustus Poniatowski.

Built on raised ground, the farm-house was of stone.  It had been a plain, square building; but in the days of Poniatowski some attempt had been made at ornamentation in the French style.  A pavilion had been built in the garden amid the pine-trees.  A sun-dial had been placed on the lawn, which was now no longer a lawn, but had lapsed again into a meadow.  The cows had polished the sun-dial with their rough sides, while the passage of cold winters and wet springs had left the plaster ornamentation mossy and broken.

Here, amid a simple people, the Bukatys spent a portion of the year.  They usually came in the winter, because it was in the winter they were needed.  The feudal spirit, which was strong in the old prince and weaker in his children, has two sides to it; but its enemies have only remembered one.  The prince took it as a matter of course that it was his duty to care for his peasants, and relieve as far as lay in his power the distress which came upon them annually with the regularity of the recurring seasons.  With a long winter and a wet spring, with a heavy taxation, and a standing bill at the village shop kept by a Jew, and the village inn kept by another, these peasants never had any money.  And so far as human foresight can perceive, there seems to be no reason why they ever should.