Then I was taken by train to Tamboff. The train is moving slowly. It is cold and dark. The air is thick with Abramov’s brutal oaths. He swears at me terribly. I felt the breath of death. Even the Cossacks felt uneasy. “Why are you silent, men? Sing! Let those wretches die with our merriment.” Then shouting and whistling began. Passions ran high. Eyes and teeth glittered, and the singing was disgusting. I was raving “Water!” No water. Then the officer takes me to the second class. He is drunk and very amiable. His arms embrace me. He unbuttons my dress. His drunken lips mutter in a beastly way: “What a velvet breast! What a magnificent body!” I have no more strength to repulse him, no voice to call out, and what use if I had? I would willingly dash my head against something, if there were anything, but this brutalized scoundrel will not allow it. He kicks me in order to disable me. I call upon the police officer, who is asleep. The Cossack officer murmurs, caressing my chin: “Why do you clench your little teeth? Look out, you may break them?” I could not get a moment of sleep that night. In the daytime he offers me wine and chocolate, and when people go away he caresses me again. Just before reaching Tamboff I fell asleep for an hour. I awoke because the officer’s arm was upon me. While taking me to the prison, he said: “After all, I am embracing you.” In Tamboff I was delirious again, and fell terribly ill. When Marie was brought to trial her judges looked upon her youth, and listened to the terrible recital of her tortures unmoved. She had killed a man, an official of the bureaucracy, therefore she must die. An opportunity was given her to speak, and she rose up and quietly said: “Gentlemen Judges! Look around you! Where do you see the light faces of the happy and contented? There are no such faces. Even those who seem, now, to have the victorious hand, are afflicted by grief--they know their hour of triumph is brief. “I am about to be sent from this life. You may kill me--you may kill me over and over again as you already have done. You may subject me to the most terrible penalties--but you can add nothing to what I have already endured. I do not fear death. You may, now, kill my body, but you cannot destroy my belief that the time of the people’s happiness and freedom is surely coming, a time when the life of the people will express itself in forms in which truth and justice will be realized--when the ideas of brotherhood and freedom will be no more empty sounds, but part of our every-day, real life. If this is truth it is no grief to lay down one’s life-- “I have finished.” A few days later the following letter was received from her by some friends in Tamboff, smuggled out through a chain of civil criminals: MY DEAR COMRADES: