The police agent, whose name I have already mentioned, Mr. Manassevitsch Maniuloff, who always had his eye on Rasputin, and who had hastened to call upon him as soon as he had seen him return to the capital, was not slow to notice the now outspoken animosity of the latter in regard to the Prime Minister, who was offensive to him as well as to the whole secret police. The latter, finding that it could no longer do what it pleased, and that it had to respect the private liberty and life of the peaceful Russian citizens, or else be called to account by Mr. Stolypine, who ever since his appointment had been working against the occult powers of the “Okhrana,” had but one idea; and this was to get rid by fair means or by foul of a master determined to control the police. It is known in Russia that Mr. Stolypine’s assassination was the work of the secret police itself, who had found the murderer in the person of one of its own agents, to whom it had furnished even the revolver with which to kill the unfortunate Stolypine. But few people dared relate all that they suspected in regard to this heinous crime, and fewer still were aware of all its details, and of the manner in which it had been planned. The truth of the story is that Mr. Maniuloff secretly took to Rasputin’s house two or three police agents, to whom the latter said that God himself had revealed to him that Russia could never be saved from the perils of revolution until the removal of Mr. Stolypine. He even blessed the officers, together with a pistol with which he presented them. It turned out afterwards that this pistol was the very weapon which the Jew Bagroff fired at the Prime Minister in the theatre of Kieff during the gala performance given there in honour of the Emperor’s visit to the town. When Stolypine had succumbed to his wounds, Rasputin made no secret of the satisfaction which his death had occasioned to him, and exerted himself in favour of several people who were supposed to have been privy to the plot that had been hatched against the life of the Prime Minister. He told his disciples that the fate which had overtaken the unhappy Stolypine did not surprise him at all, and that every one of those who would venture to oppose him would meet with a similar one in the future.