And help is nigh.
Her ruffled eagle speeds from shore to shore,
Till nations rise to bid her weep no more.”
“Wretches!” cried the Russian, “how dare you abuse the Emperor’s clemency? Will your treason never be silent?”
“Never,” replied a young Pole, “to judge by the look of the place we are coming to. There must be echoes enough among these rocks to tell the tale from eve to morning, and from morning to eve again. In the steppe we have passed, our voices were stifled in space; but among these mountains the plaint of Poland shall never die.”
“I will silence it,” growled the officer.
“Not by threats,” replied Ernest. “The Emperor has wrought his will upon us; we have no more to fear from singing our country’s songs, and we will sing them.”
“You carry your bar on your shoulder,” said the Russian. “You shall all be chained to it by the wrists as before, unless you cease to blaspheme the Emperor.”
Ernest, the young Pole, cast a glance behind him, and seeing the exhaustion of his friend Taddeus, who had been lately crippled, and the fatigue of Owzin, the father of Taddeus, and of old Alexander, the feeblest of the party, he had compassion on them, and refrained from answering the tyrant who had it as much in his will as his power to fetter them, though no chance of escape afforded him a pretence for doing so. In order to remind them of their present position in relation to himself, the officer addressed them by the new titles which he had never yet been able to get them to recognize.
“Three! you will sink in the marsh presently, if you do not keep the line. Halt, there, Seven! If you get on so fast I will shoot you. Two! no shifting your bar yet. You have not had your fair share of it.”