But on one occasion, as he was a good reader, he was asked to read aloud Byelinsky's famous letter to Gogol, which was regarded as a victorious manifest of "Western" (_i. e._, of socialistic) views. This, technically, was propagating revolution, and was the chief charge against him when the catastrophe happened, and he, together with over thirty other "Petrashevtzi," was arrested on April 23d (May 5th), 1849. In the Peter-Paul Fortress prison, where he was kept for eight months pending trial, Dostoévsky wrote 'The Little Hero,' two or three unimportant works having appeared since 'Poor People.' At last he, with several others, was condemned to death and led out for execution. The history of that day, and the analysis of his sensations and emotions, are to be found in several of his books: 'Crime and Punishment,' 'The Idiot,' 'The Karamazoff Brothers.' At the last moment it was announced to them that the Emperor had commuted their sentence to exile in varying degrees, and they were taken to Siberia. Alexei Pleshtcheeff, then twenty-three years of age, the man who sent Byelinsky's letter to Dostoévsky, was banished for a short term of years to the disciplinary brigade in Orenburg; and when I saw him in St. Petersburg forty years later, I was able to form a faint idea of what Dostoévsky's popularity must have been, by the way in which he,--a man of much less talent, originality, and personal power,--was surrounded, even in church, by adoring throngs of young people. Dostoévsky's sentence was "four years at forced labor in prison; after that, to serve as a common soldier"; but he did not lose his nobility and his civil rights, being the first noble to retain them under such circumstances.