quences of such a misfortune would be we could only conjecture. No attempt had yet been made to watch or follow us, so far as we were aware; but the room adjoining ours in the hotel was occupied by four officers, including a captain or colonel of gendarmes, and Mr. Frost thought that he had more than once heard, through the thin intervening partition, a conversation among these men with regard to the real object of our Siberian journey, and a discussion of methods by which our papers might be secured, or at least subjected to police inspection. One night, during our second week's stay in Chíta, I came back to the hotel about two o'clock in the morning from a visit to the political exiles' carpenter-shop. There was not a sound nor a suggestion of life in the deserted streets of the little provincial town, the windows of the hotel were all dark, the servant who admitted me was only half awake, Mr. Frost was slumbering peacefully on a wooden bench in our room, and perfect stillness prevailed throughout the building. Apparently, everybody had been asleep for horns. The room occupied by the four officers was separated from ours only by a thin lath-and-paper wall through which there happened to be an intercommunicating door. Under this door was a vacant space of three or four inches, which, with the flimsiness of the partition, permitted sounds to pass from room to room with almost perfect freedom. Excited by the ghastly story of the murder of the political offender Sómof in the Odéssa prison, which I had just heard from one of the exiles, I could not sleep, and lighting a candle, I lay down on the floor with my head to the partition wall and tried to divert my thoughts by reading. For at least half an hour the only sound that came to my ears was Mr. Frost's soft, regular breathing. Suddenly the stillness, which was so profound as to be almost oppressive, was broken by the loud "Bang!" of a revolver almost opposite my head, on the other side of the partition. Surprised and startled, I raised myself on one elbow and listened. Nothing could be heard except a
