The strangest of all was told me by Prince Vassiltchikoff, an aide-de-camp attached to the War Office. He had been sent to Siberia on a special mission to report upon the prisons in that land of woe. Among other criminals he came upon a handsome woman, evidently of a superior class. Struck by her appearance, he asked her why she was there. Without hesitation the woman answered: “I made the sign of the cross upon my father.” She had murdered him! It appeared that her father had illtreated her child; mad with rage, she stabbed him in the back. She expressed neither sorrow nor repentance for what she had done, and to all further questions her only answer was: “I have done wrong and I suffer for it—the rest is with myself.” Could Æschylus himself have put more poignantly tragic words into that unhappy daughter’s mouth? What a saying to express parricide! “I made the sign of the cross upon him.” Duels in Russia were very rare; all the more did they create a sensation when they did occur. There was a double duel which took place while I was there and which was much talked about. A young Polish officer of the Grodno Hussar regiment insulted two Russian officers. I never heard the rights of the story or what was the occasion of the quarrel. At any rate, the Pole had to fight both the men whom he had affronted. In the first duel, possibly from nervous excitement, he fired before the seconds gave the signal and broke his adversary’s leg. The second duel took place the next day, and this time it was _à la barrière_. The Pole immediately on the signal to advance being given fired in the air. His adversary let him come forward to the extreme limit allowed by the agreement—five paces—took deliberate aim and shot him in the head; he died a few hours afterwards. The officer who killed him was a rich man of good family, but none the less we were told that he would be broken, reduced to the ranks, and have to serve as a common soldier. Duelling was strictly forbidden both by military and civil law. I suppose it is a crime, but none the less it does seem to me that there are certain cases in which it is a safeguard to society and more than permissible. The absurd journalistic duels of which we hear so much on the Continent are quite another matter. The most famous duel in the history of Russian society was that in which the great poet Puschkin lost his life in the winter of 1837. The story is a curious one.