“The dreamer was arrested,” he continued, pushing away his plate, “on some trivial excuse.  He was not dangerous, but he might be.  There was no warrant and no trial.  The Czar had been graciously pleased to give his own personal attention to this matter which dispensed with all formalities and futilities . . . of justice.  Siberia!  Wife with great difficulty obtained permission to follow.  They were young—­last of the family.  Better that they should be the last—­thought the paternal government of Russia.  But she had influential relatives—­so she went.  She found him working in the mines.  She had taken the precaution of bringing doctor’s certificates.  Work in the mines would inevitably kill him.  Could he not obtain in-door work?  He petitioned to be made the body-servant of the governor of his district—­man who had risen from the ranks—­and was refused.  So he went to the mines again—­and died.  The wife had in her turn been arrested for attempting to aid a prisoner to escape.  Then the worst happened—­she had a son, in prison, and all the care and forethought of the paternal government went for nothing.  The pestilential race was not extinct, after all.  The ancestors of that prison brat had been kings of Poland.  But the paternal government was not beaten yet.  They took the child from his mother, and she fretted and died.  He had nobody now to care for him, or even to know who he was, but his foster-father—­that great and parental government.”

Joseph paused, and looked round the table with a humorous twinkle in his eyes.

“Nice story,” he said, “isn’t it?  So the brat was mixed up with other brats so effectually that no one knew which was which.  He grew up in Siberia, and was drafted into a Cossack regiment.  And at last the race was extinct; for no one knew.  No one, except the recording angel, who is a bit of a genealogist, I guess.  Sins of the fathers, you know.  Somebody must keep account of ’em.”

The dessert was on the table now; for the story had taken longer in the telling than the reading of it would require.

“Cartoner, help Netty to some grapes,” said the host, “and take some yourself.  Story cannot interest you—­must be ancient history.  Well—­after all, it was with the recording angel that the Russian government slipped up.  For the recording angel gave the prison brat a face that was historical.  And if I get to Heaven, I hope to have a word with that humorist.  For an angel, he’s uncommon playful.  And the brat met another private in the Cossack regiment who recognized the face, and told him who he was.  And the best of it is that the government has weeded out the dangerous growth so carefully that there are not half a dozen people in Poland, and none in Russia, who would recognize that face if they saw it now.”

Joseph poured out a glass of wine, which he drank with outstretched chin and dogged eyes.

“Man’s loose in Poland now,” he added.

And that was the end of the story.