“I will atone for the insult in any way your high Excellency desires,” declared the official.  “I will serve your Excellency in any way he may command.”

His words suggested a brilliant idea.  I had this man in my power; he feared me.

“Well,” I said after some reluctance, “there is a little matter in which you might be of some assistance.  If you will, I will reconsider my decision of complaining to Petersburg.”

“And what is that, Excellency?” he gasped eagerly.

“I desire to know the whereabouts of a young English lady named Elma Heath,” I said, and I wrote down the name for him upon a piece of paper.  “Age about twenty, and was at school at Chichester, in England.  She is a niece of a certain Baron Oberg.”

“Baron Oberg!” he repeated, looking at me rather strangely, I thought.

“Yes, as she is a foreigner she will be registered in your books.  She is somewhere in your province, but where I do not know.  Tell me where she is, and I will say nothing more about my passport,” I added.

“Then your high Excellency wishes to see the young lady?” he said reflectively, with the paper in his hand.

“Yes.”

“In that case, it being commanded by the Emperor that I shall serve your Excellency, I will have immediate inquiries made,” was his answer.  “When I discover her whereabouts, I will do myself the pleasure of calling at your Excellency’s hotel.”

And I left the fellow, very satisfied that I had turned his officiousness and hatred of the English to very good account.

On that gray, dreary northern coast the long winter was fast setting in.  Poor oppressed Finland suffers under a hard climate with August frosts, an eight months’ winter in the north, and five months of frost in the south.  Idling in sleepy Abo, where the public buildings were so mean and meager and the houses for the most part built of wood, I saw on every hand the disastrous result of the attempted Russification of the country.  The hand of the oppressor, that official sent from Petersburg to crush and to conquer, was upon the honest Finnish nation.  The Russian bureaucracy was trying to destroy its weaker but more successful neighbor, and in order to do so employed the harshest and most unscrupulous officials it could import.

My fellow-traveler from Stockholm, who represented a firm of paper-makers in Hamburg, and who paid an annual visit to Abo and Helsingfors, acted as my guide around the town, while I awaited the information from the humbled Chief of Police.  My German friend pointed out to me how, since Russia placed her hand upon Finland, progress had been arrested, and certainly plain evidences were on every hand.  There was growing discontent everywhere, for many of the newspapers had recently been suppressed and the remainder were under a severe censorship; agriculture had already decreased, and many of the cotton-spinning and saw mills were silent and deserted.  The exploitation