General Cassius Clay was United States Minister in Russia at the time of which I am writing. He was rather a notorious person whose name _Punch_ had, owing to his virulent abuse of England, translated into Brutus Mud. One day General Clay came up to me and began speaking in the friendliest way about England. After some generalities he turned the conversation on to the Polish question, belauding Lord Russell’s despatches, which he said had made “his old Anglo-Saxon blood boil in his veins when he saw the magnanimous attitude of an English statesman.” I don’t think that clinical thermometers had been invented in those days, but it would have been interesting to have taken the temperature of the good General’s “Anglo-Saxon blood” when he came to read the final collapse of all the bluster. The insurrection died a not altogether natural death in 1864. It had been a hopeless affair from the first, and the moral influence of a secret Treaty concluded between Prussia and Russia[38] extinguished the last embers of the fire. Bands of peasants, undrilled, armed with scythes and with such primitive weapons as might come to hand, lurking houseless, half starved and miserably clothed in the frozen mazes of pathless forests, could not for long resist the trained battalions of the Tsar and the curse of the climate. Langiewicz saw that the last trick in the game had been trumped, and the dictator left the poor wretches to their fate. I have one more tale to tell of the Polish revolution. The race of Bobadils is not extinct. For them proclamations of neutrality are things of no account, at which they snap their fingers; so long as matters go well with them they are as truculent as their own swords; but once let them fall into difficulties and be taken prisoners, their cries are piteous, and the Foreign Offices of their various countries are besieged with prayers that their Ambassadors may be instructed to interfere on their behalf. One day, when the Polish insurrection was still ablaze, there came a batch of telegrams to the Embassy directing Lord Napier to plead on behalf of a certain English gentleman who, having been taken red-handed in some murderous attack, would be tried by court martial and shot unless some pressure could be brought to bear on his behalf. Lord Napier knew that it would be useless to enter into a diplomatic correspondence on the subject, so he at once asked for an audience of the Tsar, which was immediately granted. It was not a pleasant duty.