Alexander Petrovitch’s wife stood up and turned pale. The schoolboys and the students surrounded Alexander Petrovitch and, linking their arms in his, forced him out of the room. He turned round and looked at his wife and the children. “I thought as much!” he said. Then he was pushed out of the room and down the staircase. All this happened in a moment. His wife stood still as though transfixed, and could not move or utter. Two or three minutes passed in breathless silence, and Peter began to cry. They had left the door open. The banging of the street door was heard, and then two or three shots rang out. Sasha, the maid, came rushing into the room, screaming with all her might-- “They have killed Alexander Petrovitch in the yard!” THE AMORPHISTS I was staying not long ago in a small town in the centre of Russia which I will call T----. It was a small, sleepy town, through which an indolent river wended its way. The houses were low, one-storeyed, built of wood and painted white, adorned with old-fashioned delicate stucco, delicate pilasters and wooden verandahs; and many of them had gardens and trellis-work arbours. The place breathed a spirit of the dying eighteenth century. One seemed to be in a kind of Russian “Cranford.” The shops and market-places, the hotel with its stiff early Victorian furniture--mahogany, stuffed with faded red rep--the squatting churches, the slow moving, leisurely inhabitants, all seemed to belong to a remoter time than ours. Here, I thought, in any case, the Revolution cannot have penetrated; to seek for politics here would be like looking for bombs in the Garden of Proserpine. But when I was waiting for my dinner in the dining-room of the hotel, when the great mechanical barrel-organ had played a tune by Donizetti out of _Lucrezia Borgia_ for the tenth time, I was disillusioned by the innkeeper, a fat, smiling man, with a huge beard, high boots, and a loose, white untucked shirt, with a red corded waistband round it. “Here,” I said to him, “you have in any case the advantage of being free from revolutionary turmoil.” “How so?” he asked, in a slightly injured tone, which was due to the fact, not that I had suspected his native city of being anti-revolutionary, but of being void of teeming events. “We, too, have our disorders, very serious disorders,” he said, with pride. “The day before yesterday there were terrible occurrences.” “Really,” I answered, with great interest, “what were they?” “Is it possible that you have not heard,” he asked, “Why, everybody knows that the day before yesterday the Amorphists made an attempt.” I confessed that I had not heard of it, because I had been very busy, and I pressed him to relate to me the proceedings of the Amorphists, adding that I was not quite sure who the Amorphists were.