A committee was formed to raise funds, and then came the explosion, striking evidence of the enormous difference between the American and the Continental point of view in morals. With characteristic Russian impracticability, Gorki had come to America with a woman whom he introduced as his wife; but it appeared that his legal wife was in Russia, and that his attractive and accomplished companion was somebody else. This fact, which honestly seemed to Gorki an incident of no importance, took on a prodigious shape. This single mistake cost the Russian revolutionary cause an enormous sum of money, and may have altered history. Gorki was expelled from his hotel, and refused admittance to others; unkindest cut of all, Mark Twain, whose absence of religious belief had made Gorki believe him to be altogether emancipated from prejudices, positively refused to have anything more to do with him. As Gorki had said, "When Mark Twain hit, he hit hard." Turn whither he would, every door was slammed in his face. I do not think he has ever recovered from the blank amazement caused by the American change of front. His golden opportunity was gone, and he departed for Italy, shaking the dust of America off his feet, and roundly cursing the nation that he had just declared to be the incarnation of progress. The affair unquestionably has its ludicrous side, but it was a terrible blow to the revolutionists. Many of them believed that the trap was sprung by the government party. Gorki's full-length novels are far from successful works of art. They have all the incoherence and slipshod workmanship of Dostoevski, without the latter's glow of brotherly love. His first real novel, "Foma Gordeev," an epic of the Volga, has many beautiful descriptive passages, really lyric and idyllic in tone, mingled with an incredible amount of drivel. The character who plays the title-role is a typical Russian windbag, irresolute and incapable, like so many Russian heroes; but whether drunk or sober, he is destitute of charm. He is both dreary and dirty. The opening chapters are written with great spirit, and the reader is full of happy expectation. One goes farther and fares worse. After the first hundred pages, the book is a prolonged anti-climax, desperately dull. Altogether the best passage in the story is the description of the river in spring, impressive not merely for its beauty and accuracy of language, but because the Volga is interpreted as a symbol of the spirit of the Russian people, with vast but unawakened possibilities.