Before I proceed to describe the other inmates of the women’s prison, I must digress for a moment to relate an incident which in its time caused great excitement among the newspaper-reading public. Towards the end of February, 1881, the police of Petersburg had their suspicions directed to a certain cheesemonger’s shop in that city, where something illegal was supposed to be going forward. A search-party, one member of which was an engineer of the pioneer corps, was sent to investigate, but discovered nothing of any consequence. The next day came the assassination of the Tsar, and three days after that the cheese-shop was suddenly deserted by its occupants, among whom had been a married couple calling themselves Kòbozev—peasants from the interior of Russia, according to their perfectly regular papers. The police now made a more effectual search, and found that a subterranean passage had been made from the cheese-shop to the Màlaya Sadòvaya, a street through which the Tsar often passed. This tunnel had been meant to serve as a mine for blowing up the Tsar’s carriage in case the bombs had failed to do their work. It is easy to imagine what must have been the feelings of the two revolutionists who passed under the name of Kòbozev when the police made their first visit to the shop; the underground passage had then just been completed, and the cases and barrels, supposed to contain cheese, were filled with the earth that had been dug out. Had the police but lifted the straw matting that covered them, the whole plot, like many others before, might have been doomed to failure. The humble peasant-woman who had served in that shop was Anna Yakìmova. She was the daughter of a priest, and had been a village schoolmistress. Like so many others, she had gone “among the people,” and had been one of the accused in the “Case of the 193”; she was acquitted, but was nevertheless sent by administrative order to a forlorn spot in the north of Russia, whence in 1879 she escaped and came to Petersburg, where I made her acquaintance. Subsequently she joined the _Naròdnaia Vòlya_, and took an active part in a series of attempts against the life of the Tsar. She had helped Zhelyàbov and others in 1879 to undermine the station at Alexandròvskaya, through which the Tsar was expected to pass. After many escapes she was eventually arrested, and condemned to death in the “Trial of the Twenty”; but her sentence was commuted, she was imprisoned in the Fortress of Peter and Paul, and sent to Kara in 1884. I need hardly say that Anna Yakìmova was a person of strong-willed and determined character; all the women who took part in our movement of the seventies were of one type in that respect, and eminently so Praskòvya Ivanòvskaya and Nadyèshda Smirnitskaya, (both sentenced in 1883,) who, with Yakìmova, formed a little group by themselves in the Kara prison. They had been friends of old, shared the same opinions, and were similar in tastes and temperament.