On making inquiries through the Russian departments of foreign affairs and of justice, I found the fact to be that this injured American had been, twenty years before, a Russian police agent in Poland; that he had stolen funds intrusted to him and had taken refuge in America; that, relying on the amnesty proclaimed at the accession of the late Emperor, he had returned to his old haunts; that he had been seized, because the amnesty did not apply to the category of criminals to which he belonged; that he had not been sent to Siberia; that there was no thought of sending him there; but that the authorities proposed to recover the money he had stolen if they could. Another case was typical: One day an excellent English clergyman came to me in great distress, stating that an American citizen was imprisoned in the city. I immediately had the man brought before a justice, heard his testimony and questioned him, publicly and privately. He swore before the court, and insisted to me in private, that he had never before been in Russia; that he was an American citizen born of a Swedish father and an Alaskan mother upon one of the Alaskan islands; and he showed a passport which he had obtained at Washington by making oath to that effect. On the other hand appeared certain officers of the Russian navy, in excellent standing, who swore that they knew the man perfectly to be a former employee of their engineering department and a deserter from a Russian ship of war in the port of St. Petersburg. It was also a somewhat significant fact that he spoke Russian much better than English, and that he seemed to have a knowledge of Russian affairs very remarkable for a man who had never been in Russia; but to account for this he insisted upon the statement as to his birth in Alaska. Appearances were certainly very strongly against him, and he was remanded to await more testimony in his favor; but the next thing I heard was that he had escaped, had arrived in New York, was posing as a martyr, had graciously granted interviews to various representatives of the press, and had thereby stimulated some very lurid editorials against the Russian Government. Another case was that of a Russian who, having reached the United States, burdened the files of the State Department and of the legation with complaints against the American minister because that official did not send out the man's wife to him. The minister had, indeed, forwarded the necessary passports, but the difficulty was that the German authorities would not allow the woman to enter Germany without showing herself to be in possession of means sufficient to prevent her becoming a public charge; and these her husband could not, or would not, send, insisting that now that he was naturalized he had a right to have his wife brought to America.