To return to my present narrative. I made two protests against the magistrate’s decision to send me before a court-martial: one directed to the president of the Military Court in Odessa, and one to Nabòkov, the Minister of Justice. I called Bogdanòvitch to witness that the Government of Baden had only surrendered me on condition that I should be brought before an ordinary court, and tried by civil, not martial law. If a military court were to try me for desertion and insulting an officer, that would be against the conditions of the treaty, which laid down that I should only be answerable on the Gorinòvitch count. As was to be foreseen, my petitions were set aside without further parley; and soon after, my indictment, signed by the Public Prosecutor of the Courts-martial, was put before me. This indictment left me in no doubt as to what kind of trial I was to have. Certainly the facts relating to the assault on Gorinòvitch were given; but nothing whatever was said as to the motives, nor as to the circumstances that led to it. Of course, the prosecutor had not failed to make use of the most stringent articles in the Russian Criminal Code. The heaviest punishment authorised therein (for parricide and such-like crimes) is penal servitude for life, and it was the very article dealing with that sentence which was cited in my case. According to the law this penalty is capable of various degrees of mitigation under certain extenuating circumstances: _e.g._ it may be reduced to twenty years’ penal servitude when the victim of the assault survives, even though against the intention of his assailant; and further, the term of years is to be shortened by a third if the perpetrator be under age at the date of the crime. In accordance with this, the Public Prosecutor asked for thirteen years and four months as my sentence, that being the maximum penalty to which I could be liable under the terms of the extradition treaty. Even then, the proclamation made at the time of Alexander III.’s accession might come into consideration; by it judges were authorised to remit the punishments for any crime committed before the date of the proclamation. In my case there was no hope of this permission being used; and I looked upon this whole travesty of justice as a formality which had to be gone through, but otherwise of no significance. I therefore declined the assistance of the advocate assigned to me (some candidate for a military post), and prepared to endure the unpleasant ordeal as best I could.