how he arrived at so stupendous an aphorism, he answered that it just came to him.  There were troubles in the neighbourhood over the audacity of this utterance; some called it a divine inspiration, to the majority it was known as the Unnamable Heresy.  For a brief while the town was formed into two camps, and the Chief of Police, a prudent official, was at his wit’s end what to do with these inflammable elements, seeing that the ex-monk’s followers had now swelled to several hundreds and contained not a few of the more influential aristocrats of the city.  In this dilemma, he applied for instruction to the Procurator of the Holy Synod.  That gentleman, having considered the case, rashly decided that a visionary of this stamp might be useful for furthering certain projects of his own.  He hoped, by placing under an obligation, to fashion out of the young reformer an amenable instrument—­a miscalculation which he lived (though not for long) to repent.  Under the Procurator’s aegis, Bazhakuloff was summoned to the Capital.  The political period was beginning.  Moscow, on the whole, was glad to see the last of him—­particularly the Chief of Police.

There began the most brilliant epoch of his life.  By steps which it is needless to trace, he fought and wormed his way into the favour of the Court.  A good deal of his worldly success may well have been due, as his enemies assert, to an incredible mixture of cringing, astuteness, and impudence.  It stands to reason, however, that a man of this type must have possessed sterling qualities of his own to be found occupying—­all this was years and years ago—­a suite of apartments in the Palace, where he lived in splendour, a Power behind the Throne, the Confidental Adviser of the Highest Circles.  His monkish garb was soon encrusted with orders and decorations, no State function was complete without his presence, no official appointment, from the highest and lowest sphere of government, was held to be valid without his sanction.  Red blouses, one of several keys to his favour, could be counted by thousands.  He crushed opposition with an iron hand.  He wrought a miracle or two; but what chiefly accounted for the almost divine veneration in which he was held was a succession of lucky prophecies—­none luckier than that wherein, during one of his moments of inspired self-abstraction, he foretold the early and violent death of the former protector, the man to whom he owed this rise to the pinnacles of fame.  For even so it fell out.  Not many days later the Procurator of the Holy Synod was found murdered in bed by an unknown hand.  A certain journalist, writing from Switzerland, boldly states that the Procurator was murdered at the instigation of Bazhakuloff and claims to have heard, from an eye-witness whom he does not name, of a bitter quarrel between the two on the subject of a certain lady as to whose identity we are also left in doubt.  It may be true; such things have happened ere now.  This particular writer’s