reasonable man who moderated the savage onslaughts of the major, or the latter would have caused sad misfortune by his bad administration.” This major was universally loathed by the prisoners, and more than once was on the verge of murderous attack. There were times when the convicts at Omsk were goaded to desperation by his brutality. One day a dozen men from Little Russia swore to take his life, and their leader had borrowed the kitchen knife and secreted it about his person. The grievance for the moment was the badness of the food, and when the major came in to expostulate, the assailant rushed at him, but found that his victim was drunk, or, according to prison superstition, “under special protection.” It was more than he deserved, for he was a blasphemous and overbearing wretch. After having carried the knapsack for many long years, promotion to the grade of officer had turned his head. Captain Nikolin was an officer of gensdarmes who had been specially selected at St. Petersburg and sent out to govern the state prisons at Kara. Kennan speaks of him as “an old and experienced gendarme officer of the most subtle and unscrupulous type, who had received his training under General Muraviov, ‘the hangman, in Poland,’ and had been about thirty years in the service.... He had the suavity and courteous manners of the accomplished gendarme officer, ... and he greeted me with what he intended for frank, open cordiality, softening, so far as possible, all the hard lines of his face; but he could not bring a spark of good fellowship into his cold, watchful gray eyes, and I felt conscious that all his real mental processes were carefully masked.” He was very proud of his position: that he, a simple captain of gensdarmes, had been sent to this important command, where he was independent of local control and entitled to correspond direct with the minister of the interior. His whole object was to hoodwink Kennan, whom he assured blandly and mendaciously that the prisoners led a life of ease, even of luxury, sitting in a _kamera_ like a club smoking room, reading and writing and pleasantly conversing. He further asserted that the “politicals” received considerable sums from their friends in Russia; that they bought what books they pleased, had newspapers, including the London _Punch_ and other illustrated papers, and in a word, were “treated with gracious clemency by an enlightened and paternal government.” Nikolin showed the cloven foot later when he urged his colleague to seize Mr. Kennan’s baggage and search it, by which high-handed proceeding, happily avoided, much of the incriminating material so daringly secured by the fearless American, would have been lost to the indignant readers of the civilised world.