arrived about 4 p.m.  The man’s story was true in every particular.  He had fallen off a moving tram and cut his face; his wife, terrified at the idea of unknown dangers in Russia, had borrowed a revolver and dagger from a friend, and had packed them in her husband’s trunk without his knowledge.  Mr. D—–­(I remember his name perfectly) was well known in Stockholm, and was a man of the highest respectability.  I drove as fast as I could to the grubby hotel, where I found the poor fellow still restlessly pacing the room, and still smoking cigarette after cigarette.  There was a perfect Mont Blanc of cigarette stumps on a plate, and the shifty-looking plain-clothes men were still watching their man like hawks.  I told the police that they had got hold of the wrong man, that the Embassy was quite satisfied about him, and that they must release the gentleman at once.  They accordingly did so, and the alluring vision of the ten thousand pounds vanished into thin air!  The poor man was quite touchingly grateful to me; he had formed the most terrible ideas about a Russian State prison, and seemed to think that he owed his escape entirely to me.  I had not the moral courage to tell him that I had myself ordered his arrest that morning, still less of the awful crime of which he had been suspected.  Looking back, I do not see how I could have acted otherwise; the prima facie case against him was so strong; never was circumstantial evidence apparently clearer.  Mr. D—–­went back to Sweden next day, as he had had enough of Russia.  Should Mr. D—­ still be alive, and should he by any chance read these lines, may I beg of him to accept my humblest apologies for the way I behaved to him thirty-eight years ago.

I happened to see the four assassins of Alexander II. driven through the streets of Petrograd on their way to execution.  They were seated in chairs on large tumbrils, with their backs to the horses.  Each one had a placard on his, or her breast, inscribed “Regicide” ("Tsaryubeeyetz” in Russian).  Two military brass bands, playing loudly, followed the tumbrils.  This was to make it impossible for the condemned persons to address the crowd, but the music might have been selected more carefully.  One band played the well-known march from Fatinitza.  There was a ghastly incongruity between the merry strains of this captivating march and the terrible fate that awaited the people escorted by the band at the end of their last drive on earth.  When the first band rested, the second replaced it instantly to avoid any possibilities of a speech.  The second band seemed to me to have made an equally unhappy selection of music.  “Kaiser Alexander,” written as a complimentary tribute to the murdered Emperor by a German composer, is a spirited and tuneful march, but as “Kaiser Alexander” was dead, and had been killed by the very people who were now going to expiate their crime, the familiar tune jarred horribly.  A jaunty, lively march tune, and death