He had been given to understand that if he walked to a certain junction he might find a train returning to Petrograd. Tired, he sat by the wayside, and undoing his wallet ate the black bread and dried fish which he had procured at the last village. And, while eating, he became aware of something gleaming in the rank grasses of the ditch—something long and pallid and horrible. He slid down and found a dead man, stark naked, lying on his back with the contused mark of a bullet hole in his chest. A man of fifty, with short-cropped, grizzled hair and moustache, and clear, refined features. He must have been dead two days. There he lay, constricted of limb, stripped of everything that could mean warmth or comfort or money to his murderers. The living man’s short experience told him that such things were not uncommon in great revolutions. He was about to leave the corpse—for what could he do?—when his eyes caught the glint of metal a few feet away. It was a pocket compass. And further on he found at intervals a toothbrush; a coverless, tattered copy of Tacitus; a little faded snapshot of a woman mounted on cardboard; a vulcanite upper plate of half a dozen false teeth; and a little fat book with curling covers of American cloth. Had he continued his search he might have found many other objects discarded by the robbers as useless. But what was the good of pieces of conviction for a judicial enquiry that would never take place? The little fat book, which on opening he found to be manuscript in minute handwriting, he thrust in his pocket. And so he went his way. But on his way, his curiosity being aroused, he read in the little book an absorbing diary of amazing adventures, of hardships and prison and tortures unspeakable; and without a thought of its value, further than its romantic fascination, he grew to regard it during his wanderings as his most precious possession. So far again, until he reached Riga, there was truth in the story of his Russian traverse. Had he not prowled suspect about revolutionary Petrograd? Had not the Prince and Princess, the idealized parents of the story, been murdered and their wealth, together with his own few thousand roubles, been confiscated? Was he not a fugitive? Indeed, had he not seen the inside of a horrible prison? It is true that after a day or two he managed by bribery to escape. But the essence of things was there—the grain of fact which, under the sunlight of his genius, expanded into the splendid growth of Truth. And his wit had served him, too. His guards were for taking away the precious book. Knowing them to be illiterate, he declared it to be the manuscript of his republican poem. Challenged to read, he recited from memory verses of Shevchenko, until they were convinced, not only of the book’s contents, but of his own revolutionary opinions. This establishment of his orthodoxy, together with a few roubles, assured his escape. And thence had he not gone northwards, hungry and footsore?