then ignorant of the massacres which had recently desolated Galicia, and I did not even know that in this very Duchy of Posen a vast conspiracy had been discovered; for it was not in the solitudes of the Oural chain, nor yet among the lowest of the Russian people, that I could have learnt these heavy and sad tidings. I reached Memel, Tilsit and Königsberg successively without any obstacles. I walked by day, and slept under the stars; I was nowhere annoyed about my passport, and to the unfrequent questions of merchants and travellers I replied that I was a Frenchman, a cotton-spinner, returning from Russia. At last on July 27th, having reached Königsberg, I saw in the harbour a vessel that was to sail on the following day for Elbing. Tired of constant walking, I wished to profit by a means of transport which could be had for a moderate price, and which would have taken me nearly to the Grand Duchy of Posen, and to my friends. I determined therefore to remain in Königsberg till the following day. While waiting in this way I sauntered about the town, and as evening fell I sat down on a heap of stones near a dismantled house, meaning at night to wander away and sleep in the cornfields, and to return next morning before the vessel sailed. Alas! I had not reckoned on my bodily fatigue any more than on the exhaustion of my strength, and a certain carelessness had been engendered by the last period of comparative security. Upon this heap of stones I fell asleep, and slept deeply. When I awoke, roughly shaken by the arm by some man, it was a dark night. A stranger stood before me, a night-watcher of the town, as they are called. He asked me who I was, and whence I came? Drunk with sleep, I muttered some incoherent words, and when a sense of my danger finally recalled me to myself, it was in vain that, in my infamous German, I offered any explanations as to who I was, and how I came to be there; all my answers seemed suspicious. My complete ignorance of the place and the darkness of the night prevented me from beginning to struggle with him, or attempting to fly; I did feel for my dagger, but luckily I could not find it. The constable took hold of my arm, called his comrades, and carried me off by force to the nearest office. I was arrested...! The feeling which came over me when once more I found myself in a prison was one of shame, far more than of sadness or of despair. To have escaped from the _katorga_, to have crossed the Oural Mountains, to have slept for months in the snow in ostiak _earths_, to have endured so many sufferings and privations, to have leapt the Russian boundary line among the musket balls of soldiers, and now to be taken up by neither more nor less than a Prussian night constable! It really was too ridiculous, and I blushed for myself.