—that they were unusually favorable specimens of their class,—and it seemed to me not improbable that in the wilder and remoter parts of Western Siberia I should find types that would correspond more nearly to the conception of nihilists that I had formed in America.
Before we had been in the village an hour, two of the exiles—Messrs. Blok and Gross—called upon us and introduced themselves. Mr. Blok won my heart from the very first. He was a man twenty-six or twenty-eight years of age, of medium height and athletic figure, with light-brown hair, blue eyes, and a beardless but strong and resolute face, which seemed to me to express intelligence, earnestness, and power in every line. It was, in the very best sense of the word, a good face, and I could no more help liking and trusting it than I could help breathing. Marcus Aurelius somewhere says, with coarse vigor of expression, that "a man who is honest and good ought to be exactly like a man who smells strong, so that the bystander, as soon as he comes near, must smell, whether he choose or not." Mr. Blok's honesty and goodness seemed to me to be precisely of this kind, and I found myself regarding him with friendly sympathy, and almost with affection, long before I could assign any reason for so doing. Mr. Gross was a rather handsome man, perhaps thirty years of age, with brown hair, full beard and mustache, gray eyes, and clearly cut, regular features. He talked in an eager, animated way, with an affectionate, caressing modulation of the voice, and had a habit of unconsciously opening his eyes a little more widely than usual as an expression of interest or emotion. Both of the young men were university graduates; both spoke French and German, and Mr. Gross read English; both were particularly interested in questions of political economy, and either of them might have been taken for a young professor, or a post-graduate student, in the Johns Hopkins University. I had not talked with them an hour before I became satisfied that in intelligence and culture
