To be exempt from corporal chastisement is one of the privileges of a Russian noble; and in cases of deportation a member of the nobility should not be obliged to make the journey on foot, or in a gang of convicts. This does not prevent the torture being applied to political prisoners, even when nobles, during the progress of an examination; yet their sentence is in general in accordance with the laws, and it is seldom that the statutes are set aside, as they were in the case of the Polish prince Roman Sanguszko, to whose sentence the Emperor Nicholas undoubtedly added with his own hand the order that the prince’s journey should be made _on foot_. Thanks to the accident of my birth, I had never known the ordinary aggravations of such a lot as mine had now become, I mean the knout, the _plète_, and the march in a gang; but as many of my countrymen have undergone such punishments, and as I also should forfeit (so said the decree against me) my right of being exempt from them when I reached my destination, I shall give some more precise details upon the subject, albeit a sad one. The knout is a strip of hide, a thong which is steeped in some preparation, and strongly glazed as it were with metal filings. By this process it becomes both heavy and extremely hard, but before it hardens care is taken to double down the edges, which are left thin on purpose, and in this way a groove runs the whole length of the thong, except the upper part, which is supple, and winds round the hand of the executioner; to the other end a small iron hook is fastened. Falling on the bare back of the sufferer the knout comes down on its concave side, of which the edges cut like a knife. The thong thus lies in the flesh, and the operator does not lift it up, but draws it towards himself horizontally, so that the hook tears off long strips. If the executioner has not been bribed, and does his business conscientiously, the person under punishment loses consciousness after the third stroke, and sometimes dies under the fifth. A peculiarity of the Russian law may be also noted here, which orders that the number of blows from the knout shall always be an unequal one! The scaffold on which the sufferer is placed is called in Russ ‘a mare’ (_kobyla_). It is an inclined plane, to which the man is tied with his back uncovered. The head is firmly fastened to the upper part, the feet to the lower end, and the hands, which are also knotted together, go round below the plank; any movement of the body becoming in this way impossible. After receiving the prescribed number of strokes, the poor wretch is untied, and on his knees undergoes the punishment of being _marked_. The letters _vor_ (meaning thief, or malefactor) are printed in sharp-pointed letters on a stamp, which the executioner drives into the forehead and into both cheeks, and while the blood runs, a black mixture, of which gunpowder is an ingredient, is rubbed into the