The son knows what his request means, and soon they fall to talking of the sacrifice required. But to the pleadings of the old Khan the son returns only the argument of his own love for the girl. At length the young man proposes that “in mercy to each other” they fling her into the sea from the mountain, and in despair the Khan consents. Summoned by her lord, the girl divines all, and asks only that she be carried to the place of sacrifice in the arms of her “old eagle,” whom she loves. And so they slowly journey to the cliff, and by his arms she is flung into the sea. The son at last turns away, but-- With swift strides the Khan approached the brink, and hurled himself down. His son did not hold him back, there was no time for that. And again nothing was audible from the sea--neither shriek nor noise of the Khan’s fall. Only the waves plashed on there, and the wind hummed wild songs. Long did Tolaīk Alhalla gaze below, and then he said aloud: “And grant me, also, as stout a heart, O Allah!” And then he went forth into the gloom of the night.... Thus perished Khan Mosolaīma el Asvab, and Tolaīk Alhalla became Khan of the Crimea. Of all his varied and acrid experiences the brain of “Maxim the Bitter,” as his pseudonym means, is a bursting note-book. From it he selects with entire artlessness--that is, without either the patience or the knowledge which true art presupposes--whatever he needs for his fictional work. Hence his longer productions, novels and plays, are not well constructed. Indeed, they are marvellous mixtures of idealism, realism, humor, shocking openness, and drivel, illuminated in sudden patches by exquisite descriptions and lofty beauties. The best example of his novels is “Fomá Gordyéeff,” and his strongest play is “The Night Asylum.” The general tone of Gorki’s work is not so depressing, because not so hopeless, as that of his fellow fiction-writers of the younger generation; but none of them dives so deep into the sub-silt of the great Russian stream, for none is so native to its turgid, fetid flow. To witness before our eyes, for example, the dragging down of the girl in the short-story “Twenty-Six and One Other,” is so terrible as to revolt the hardened. Yet in his tramps, his thieves, his broken-down derelicts, there is a certain impudent bravery that strikes a new note of hopefulness for submerged Russia. It is this, I think, that endeared the young apostle of the proletariat when from 1892 to 1897 his greatest short fictional work was done. He not only had a message for revolutionary Russia, but the spirit of his characters was precisely what so many of the drifting, sodden wrecks needed--boldness to look up.