Her story begins thirty years ago, in the government of Tamboof. There, in a little house not far from the prison where she was afterward incarcerated, Marie lived with her mother and two sisters. She received unusual educational advantages, and planned to be a doctor; but as she grew older she became so engrossed in the sorrows of the Russian people that she gave up all thought of everything but revolution. Tamboof was in the grip of a governor notorious even beyond the borders of his _gubernia_ for his frightful cruelties. The peasants lived in hourly terror that he would set the Cossacks on them, order them flogged, or, worse still, burn their homes. The stories of his cruelties mounted one upon the other; and to Marie Spiridonova, brooding over them, it seemed that she and this man could no longer breathe the air of the same earth. They both chanced to be in a certain small village when a peasant girl was captured, submitted to frightful outrage by a band of Cossacks, and finally thrown into a lake. The governor knew. He neither hindered nor punished. It was too much. There was one pair of violet eyes in the village that night that did not close. Marie Spiridonova lay awake until morning, and by morning she knew what she must do. She obtained a revolver. She found the governor of Tamboof at the railway station, with his Cossack guard. She fired five fatal shots before the Cossacks, with drawn swords, closed in on her. She saw them coming, and tried to take her own life, but they were too quick. They hurled her to the sidewalk, calling to each other to “Strike her! Slash her!” They dragged her down the steps, her head bumping as she went, and lifted her by her long brown braids into an _izvostchik_. In the jail she was stripped and flogged and taunted with shouts of “Now, then, deliver us a thrilling speech!” They burned her body with lighted cigarettes, and stamped on her little feet with their heavy boots. When other forms of torture bored them, they kicked her back and forth across the cell from one to another like a football, shouting: “Now, then, tell us who your comrades are!” or, “Cry out then, you wretch, if you don’t like it!” Marie Spiridonova did not cry out. She delivered no thrilling speeches. She spoke no comrade’s name. That is not the stuff of which the Russian Revolution was made. The next night they took her back to Tamboof. Much of the time she was mercifully senseless, and remembers vaguely as a series of horrible nightmares her brief intervals of consciousness. They tried her, and sentenced her to death, and when they asked her on the day of judgment if she had anything to say for herself, she replied: