The evidence was soon got in shape, and early in April the trial began. It was shown that Jelaboff was agent in the third degree of the Revolutionary Executive Committee; that he had issued the call for volunteers for the killing of the Czar, and that forty-seven persons had offered themselves, out of whom Risakoff, Mikhaeloff, Hessy Helfmann, Kibaltchik, Sophia Perowskaja and Elnikoff had been accepted. Elnikoff was dead, but the others, with Jelaboff, were put in the dock. They all confessed except Hessy Helfmann, and upon April 11th all were condemned to death, with the proviso needed under the Russian law that the sentence of Sophia Perowskaja should be approved by the Czar, as she was a member of the class of nobles, and a noble may not be put to death without the Emperor’s concurrence. The Czar concurred, and on April 15th, at 9 a. m., all the prisoners save Hessy Helfmann were hung. This woman was reprieved because she was about to become a mother. The execution was a most brutal one. It took place on a plain two miles out of the city, in the presence of a hundred thousand people. The prisoners were taken out of the fortress on two-wheeled carts, surrounded by drummers and pipers, who played continuously and loudly, so that nothing the condemned might say could be heard by the crowd. At the scaffold the drummers were stationed in a hollow square around the gallows, and a deafening tattoo was kept up from the time the prisoners were brought in until their bodies were cut down. The hanging was very cruel. Each person was mounted on a small box, after kissing each other passionately all round. They said something, but it could not be heard for the drumming. The executioner was said to be evidently drunk. There was no drop. When the signal was given the condemned were pushed off their boxes and left to strangle. Mikhaeloff’s rope broke twice, and the attendants held him up while the executioner tied a new cord around his neck and over the beam. The bodies were buried privately. The present Czar has had several narrow escapes, none of them more nearly fatal than the conspiracy of the book-bomb in March last. On the 13th of March, 1888, the anniversary of his father’s terrible death, the Czar made the usual visit to the Cathedral of St. Peter and Paul, where the body of Alexander II. is buried. For some time before the ceremony St. Petersburg was full of rumors that a catastrophe was impending, and, although the police took the most careful precautions, the Czar himself paid no attention to the warnings of the “Third Section,” and would permit no alteration in the preparations for the requiem.