“Is this troubling you?” exclaimed the latter. “This is nothing, and we shall soon set it all right.” He took him to the “Prophet,” where the trio came to the following arrangement: The Jew was to go forthwith to the Commissariat Department and declare that he had so many thousand sand bags to sell. Rasputin was to speak in his favour and to do his best to obtain the highest prices possible. Rasputin’s secretary proceeded then to denounce the first Jew, who was the real owner of the bags, as having neglected to declare their existence. Immediately a requisition was made in the latter’s store, where the bags of course were found. Then the Jew who had given an account of them interfered, and said that they were his property, and that he had fulfilled all the formalities required by the law in regard to them. He forthwith proceeded to take possession of the bags, laughing in the face of their real owner whom he defied to claim the balance still due to him, well knowing that the unfortunate victim could do nothing, because if he had tried to complain he would inevitably have been condemned to pay a heavy fine and to be imprisoned. Then again there was a story of railway trucks in which the “Prophet” also was mixed up in some unaccountable way. Some Jews, protected no one knows to this day by whom or in what way, had obtained some contracts from the Government for different goods which were to be delivered to the army, together with the necessary numbers of railway trucks to carry them to the front. They immediately proceeded to sell these contracts at a fair price, though not an exaggerated one, to other people, but with the clause that these other people were to take upon themselves the care of forwarding the goods to their destination. And they kept for their own use and benefit the trucks which had been allotted to them, hiring them afterward to whoever wanted to have them for as much money as they could get. One Jew, a certain Mr. Bernstein, thus obtained control over more than 500 trucks, out of which he drew during six months an income amounting to something like 250,000 rubles a month. And this occurred while everybody was complaining of the impossibility of forwarding anything anywhere, owing to the total lack of railway material. It is related that in this little business, too, Rasputin was mixed up, and that without him the military contracts which the heroes of the anecdote I have just related obtained would never have been granted.