the same as that of turning up the wick of a lamp when the oil is gone. There was a momentary flare and then less light than ever before. The soldiers and everyone else viewed it at best as a confession of weakness wrung from the sovereign by his realization of his own desperate plight. Anyway, not even the most optimistic soldier believed that he would ever get the promised raise of pay. Patrols of the forbidding looking Cossacks were riding about the streets from morning until night. The plodding of their horses’ hoofs in the snow and the metallic jingle of sabers, were almost the only sound one heard in the streets. All else was quiet as the grave, and save for the shivering and destitute begging from house to house, there was almost no one else abroad in this bitter cold. Considering our high hopes for a general uprising the day passed quietly enough. Only a bomb episode along in the afternoon testified that the spirit of anarchy and revolution still smoldered beneath the surface. Not much of an event it was, even at that. Only an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate one of the local tyrants of the detective force. It would make a scare head for a local police story perhaps, but out here for the man who had the only access to the world’s cable, it was only a “significant incident.” The immediate scene is dramatic, terrible. A cold gray court-yard rises beyond a gate, at which stood a half frozen sentinel, gloomy, imperturbable, silent. Across the court was the office of the victim sought. Within the compound a half dozen bodies, now torn and mangled, masses of clothing and human flesh, lie steaming in the cold, while pools of blood freeze in little lakes of red stained snow. The frost-bitten earth crunches dryly under the feet of the clumsy officers, who, note-books in hand, are compiling their reports of the incident. One of them turns over with his heavy boot the stiffening carcass of the perpetrator of the outrage, himself torn to shreds by the explosion of his own bomb. With white teeth clinched, and glassy eyes glaring up to the gloomy December sky, he lies, soaked in his own blood, amidst the wreckage he has created, a grim evidence that no tyrant is safe in a country where there are dozens willing and eager to sacrifice their own lives to remove even one of the cogs of the vast engine of despotism, the machine that has been grinding them smaller and smaller during these many centuries. No wonder the prefect of police turns his heavy visage from the scene in which he was cast to play such an important role. He is putty colored beneath his beard as he passes to his carriage, saber dragging in the snow and spurs ringing sharply on the threshold of the great gate. The dull sentry hears the sound and comes to a present. The police officers salute. The prefect climbs into his sleigh, weighted down with rich furs, the driver cracks his whip, and they are off up the street at a gallop. He has escaped this bomb, but