slight figure. Very sweet and delicate, and somewhat sad was the face that looked out from the clinging furs, with a touch of the same melancholy that at times rests on her English sister's brow, and with more than a similitude of her gentleness and sympathy. As she crossed the threshold the slightest possible shrinking or timidity caused her to hesitate for one brief moment, then she took her place in the Royal equipage, and her face, as she turned it towards her husband, wore a brave courageous smile.

Poor Tsarina! though wrapped about on every side with all luxury, yet never to realise the happiness of confidence; never to feel secure, even in your strictest seclusion; never to know when the cruel bullet, sent with a fatally true aim, may end your tenure of greatness, and send you back to your magnificent palace, a heart-broken, lonely widow!

Behind the Empress came the Tsar, dressed, as was often his pleasure, in the scarlet kaftan of his own guard, and by which he signified his desire to remain incognito. Following him were Olga Naundorff and the Emperor's equerry, who, with Patouchki and Ivor, formed the Royal suite.

The Tsarina in passing had acknowledged Tolskoi's presence by a gracious recognition, which sent the young man's blood running hotly through his veins, flushing his face and brightening his eyes. Ivor was every inch an Imperialist, and he loved his gentle Tsarina Dagmar with a real and chivalrous devotion; the latent sadness in her eyes and the pathos of her smile touched the most responsive chords of his cold and selfish nature, and awoke in him the purest sentiment of his heart.

Olga had caught the Empress's friendly bow to Ivor, and she too relaxed somewhat the frigid demeanour she had evinced towards him, since their conversation regarding Count Mellikoff, and flashed upon him one of her most lovely smiles, as he put out his arm and almost lifted her to her place in the second sleigh. The Tsar and Tsarina drove alone in the foremost equipage, preceded and protected on either side by the guard, while in the second were seated Olga, the equerry, Patouchki, and Ivor.

The gates were flung wide apart, and thus, with the horses prancing, the bells ringing, to which the clanking swords made a monotonous echo, and the sun shining, the Royal party crossed the gay boulevard now thronged with people, and drew up at the grim and frowning archway of Peter's gloomy fortress.

CHAPTER III.

ST. PETER AND ST. PAUL.

Petropavlovsk is in itself a giant fastness, covering, as it does, three-quarters of a square mile, and divided into so many rambling corridors, barracks, ravelins, bastions, curtains, and store-houses, as to be for the most part unknown even to the officials who form its ménage, and who, having certain portions of the immense structure set apart for their duties, live out their lives without exploring, or being permitted to explore beyond their individual domains.

The boulevard and the canal intersect the building, and separate the citadel proper from what is known as the "crown work," which lies to the rear.

Dreary indeed is the outlook for the unfortunate political suspect who is hurried by night, blindfolded and closely guarded, into this living tomb. To him, hastened along through unfamiliar passages and by echoing walls, conveyed hither and thither through succeeding gates and vaulted corridors, no possible effort of memory, or mathematical calculation, can ever aid him to determine which one of the many courts, bastions, or redoubts is that selected for his incarceration.

Nor, indeed, will he ever know, for when at last the gendarmes halt, and he is allowed the use of his eyes, he finds himself in a small court-yard completely enclosed by high walls, above which only a limited sky line is visible. And where this court-yard is situated, to what bastion it appertains, whether it faces the river or lies back from it, what is its relation to the door of egress, or its connection with the other casemates of the prison, not the wildest conjecture can establish, or the keenest intuition demonstrate.

The part of the fortress, however, which the Tsar had selected for his inspection, was that known as the Trubetskoi bastion, one of the largest and most impregnable, projecting as it does well on to the river side, in the direction of the Bourse. The shape of this bastion resembles as much as possible a bishop's mitre, as worn by the Western Church; it is built, in two storeys of stone and brick, around a court-yard of its own, which extends beyond the building proper and terminates in high thick walls, that completely shut it out and in from all communication save that afforded by a narrow vaulted passage, always strongly guarded. The interior consists of two tiers of casemates, opening on to narrow corridors, two dark punishment cells, overseers' rooms, kitchen and soldiers' quarters. In the court-yard are a bath house and one or two stunted shrubs.

Nothing more gloomy and horrible can be imagined than imprisonment within one of these casemates, of which the Trubetskoi bastion boasts seventy-two, thirty-six on each tier. As they were originally designed for cannon they are considerably larger than an ordinary prison cell, but size is no mitigation of their horrors. Each casemate has a window, but it opens upon the baffling stone walls of the narrow outer court-yard, and is moreover set nine feet above the floor, in a deep arched recess, and guarded by heavy iron bars. The massive wooden door is equally disappointing, giving as it does on to the stone corridor that lies between the cells and inner court-yard; in the centre of each is a square aperture, which can be opened or closed at the will of the jailer, by a swinging panel, acting like a miniature portcullis, and which, when horizontal, serves as a shelf for the prisoner's food.

Directly above this panel is that horrible contrivance—more loathed and detested by the incarcerated wretch than any other of the diabolical arrangements—the "Judas" hagioscope or Squint, and which resembles a slit for letters more than anything else, with a nicely adjusted strip of wood that can be noiselessly raised or lowered from the outside, and through which the eyes of the guard can spy at any moment upon the occupant of the cell.

Only those who have tasted of this unending inevitable surveillance can appreciate its horrors. To be never free, never for one moment, whether in grief, or pain, or despair, from the espionage of unsympathetic eyes. To throw oneself upon one's knees before the image of Our Lady, with which each cell is supplied, to pour out all the woe and misery of one's breaking heart in the abandonment of desolation, and then, to hear the faint click of the revolving slide, and starting back, find the argus eyes of one's jailer peering through the detestable "Judas;" and to know the very words of supplication and invocation will be used against one to condemnation.

What wonder then that many who have entered Petropavlovsk bravely and with a good courage, believing their imprisonment to be but an affair of days, are never seen again, never emerge alive from its terrible dungeons; or lose mind and reason waiting for the day of deliverance that never comes?

No words can paint the growing horror and despair of a prisoner thus incarcerated. Day by day his terror expands and magnifies as hope dies in his heart, and the inexorable hand of Russia crushes out his very life.

Within the casemates there are, for furniture, an iron bedstead and table bolted into the wall, an iron oven of the commonest description, a stationary iron wash-hand basin and a statue of the Virgin, beneath which hangs a tin cup for catching the dripping moisture that exudes constantly from the stone walls.

On entering his cell for the first time, the poor victim is stripped of his clothes and given in exchange a loose blue linen dressing-gown, grey linen trousers and shirt, and a