60 BY ORDER OF THE CZAR.
larity, until the prescribed number of blows is counted. It is a ghastly sight ; the present narrator will spare the reader a detailed description of its horrors. But in Russia where so much may be purchased for gold, and indeed where so much must be purchased the venality of every official class being notorious all over the world the family of the wretch condemned to the knout may buy from the executioner what he calls the death-blow ; in that case, the operator slays the victim at the very first stroke " as surely as if it were an axe that he held in his hand."
The drums had beaten, the Governor and his officers had taken their places around the scaffold for the knout is administered with much ceremony, more especially when the punishment is intended for a salutary warning during some political crisis the crowd, awe-stricken, yet anxious to see the awful exhibition, were holding their breath with fear, the lash was writhing through the air, when a mad woman tore her way through the crowd, her hair all disheveled, her face white as her bare arms, her eyes bloodshot. But the sensation she created did not stay the flying lash. It came down with the thud of death upon the body of Losinski. The very life was beaten out of him. Ferrari knew it. Grunstein knew it. The exe- cutioner knew it. But Anna only saw the lash swing and fall, stroke after stroke, while she fought with the crowd, and at last was seized upon by Ferrari and Grunstein in the hope of saving her from the police.
" Are ye men ? " she cried, when for a moment she was at rest, " Oh, my brothers, will you stand by and see your master murdered? Great God, curse this cruel host of the fiendish Czar?"
" Peace, daughter, for Heaven's sake ! " urged Grunstein.
" Anna ! " whispered Ferrari,
"Yonder!" she cried. "Look at him the false governor, the traitor, the liar, the Christian Tarquin !
