and their servants are immune from arrest, and are not subject to the laws of the country, though they can, of course, be expelled from it.  I gave the policeman leave to enter, and he came into my bedroom.  “I have caught one of the Phoenix Park murderers,” he told me triumphantly in Russian, visions of the possible ten thousand pounds wreathing his face in smiles.  I jumped up incredulously.  He went on to inform me that a man had landed from the Stockholm steamer early that morning.  Though he declared that he had no arms with him, a revolver and a dagger had been found in his trunk.  His passport had only been issued at the British Legation in Stockholm, and his description tallied exactly with the signalment issued by Scotland Yard in eight languages.  The policier showed me the description:  “height about five feet nine; complexion sallow, with dark eyes.  Thickset build; probably with some recent cuts on face and hands.”  The policeman declared that the cuts were there, and that it was unquestionably the man wanted.  Then he put the question point-blank, would the Embassy sanction this man’s arrest?  I was only twenty-five at the time.  I had to act on “my own,” and I had to decide quickly.  “Yes, arrest him,” I said, “but you are not to take him to prison.  Confine him to his room at his hotel, with two or three of your men to watch him.  I will dress and come there as quickly as I can.”

Half an hour later I was in a grubby room of a grubby hotel, where a short, sallow, thickset man, with three recent cuts on his face, was walking up and down, smoking cigarettes feverishly, and throwing frightened glances at three sinister-looking plain-clothes men, who pretended to be quite at ease.  I looked again at the description and at the man.  There could be no doubt about it.  I asked him for his own account of himself.  He told me that he was the Manager of the Gothenburg Tramway Company in Sweden, an English concern, and that he had come to Russia for a little holiday.  He accounted for the cuts on his face and hands by saying that he had slipped and fallen on his face whilst alighting from a moving tram-car.  He declared that he was well known in Stockholm, and that his wife, when packing his things, must have put in the revolver and dagger without his knowledge.  It all sounded grotesquely improbable, but I promised to telegraph both to Stockholm and Gothenburg, and to return to him as soon as I had received the answers.  In the meanwhile I feared that he must consider himself as under close arrest.  He himself was under the impression that all the trouble was due to the concealed arms; the Phoenix Park murders had never once been mentioned.  I sent off a long telegram in cypher to the Stockholm Legation, making certain inquiries, and a longer one en clair to the British Consul at Gothenburg.  By nagging at the Attache, and by keeping that dapper young gentleman’s nose pretty close to the grindstone, I got the first telegram cyphered and dispatched by 10 a.m.; the answers