Meanwhile Edwards, whose banishment from Warsaw had removed a man who was truly desirous of sending home a fair and honest account of affairs, thus giving a free hand to more unscrupulous writers, was being shadowed by spies who took note of all his visitors. My Russian master, who also gave him lessons—a mild, harmless little man, who had taught the great Bismarck—was followed home one day as a very suspicious character. It would have been laughable if it had not been so sad. All this trouble taken to hinder and annoy a man whose sole object was to check the prosperity of lies! These flourished accordingly. Political crises are always fruitful in exaggeration and falsehood. Never, perhaps, were they so rife as during the Polish insurrection; the country was wild and inaccessible, information vague and uncertain, chaffered as an article of trade by news-pedlars, carried from great distances and losing nothing by the way; horrors were invented for hungry listeners—and there was no one to contradict. Truth remained hiding at the very lowest depths of her well. Take, for instance, the trial of Count Zamoyski, about which the English newspapers were greatly excited, one paper going as far as to say that he had been condemned to death on the strength of confessions extracted from him by torture whilst he was in prison. As a matter of fact no man could have had a fairer trial. He was found guilty of rebellion—as to that there could be no denial. It was abundantly proved that he had been a member of the Central Committee and privy to all its so-called decrees and ordinances. He was sentenced to banishment from Poland, took up his residence in France, and finally went to Cracow, where he died in his bed at the good old age of seventy-four. No milder sentence could well have been passed upon him. As for the stories of torture which were freely put about, most searching investigations on the spot proved that there was no shadow of foundation for them. Great severities were practised, especially in Lithuania under General Muravieff; floggings as judicial punishments in execution of sentences officially pronounced were frequent; but no evidence was ever produced to show that flogging had been used for the purpose of extracting evidence, and as for instruments of torture they simply did not exist.