best. In 1849, on the morrow of the Social Revolution which shook every throne of Europe, when Russia was in the clutches of the iron despotism of Nicholas I, he joined a debating club of political reformers. His adherence was purely platonic. He never took part in any plot, for there never was a less revolutionary temperament. Yet, through a grim irony of fate, he was implicated with thirty-six of his companions in a charge of conspiracy and sentenced to death. He was taken to the place of execution on a chill December morning. Standing on a raised platform with twenty-one fellow-prisoners, stripped to his shirt, with twenty-one degrees of frost, he had to listen for twenty minutes to the reading of the death sentence, with the soldiers lined in front of him and ready to shoot. At the last moment he was reprieved; but that cruel scene on that chill December morning remained a haunting obsession and coloured his imagination ever after.
The death sentence had been commuted into four years of hard labour in a Siberian convict station (described in "The House of the Dead"). He spent three more years in exile
