as to everything which took place here, but would collect and fit together every scrap of waste paper found in your room. They would thus find out that I had addressed an envelope to my brother, and would jump at the conclusion that I had written him a letter, and had given it to you for delivery. How this would affect you I don't know, but it would be fatal to me. The least I could expect would be the addition of a year to my term of exile, or banishment to some more remote part of Siberia. I am strictly forbidden to communicate with my brother, and have not heard directly from him or been able to write to him in years." I was familiar enough with the conditions of exile life in Siberia to see the force of these statements, and we began at once a search for the fragments of the envelope. Every scrap of paper on the floor was carefully examined, but the pieces that bore the dangerous name, "Pierre A. Kropótkin," could not be found. At last my traveling companion, Mr. Frost, remembered picking up some torn scraps of paper and throwing them into the slop-basin. We then dabbled in the basin for twenty minutes until we found and burned every scrap of that envelope upon which there was the stroke of a pen, and only then could Prince Kropótkin go home and sleep. "Two years hence," he said to me as he bade me good-night, "you may publish this as an illustration of the atmosphere of suspicion and apprehension in which political exiles live. In two years I hope to be beyond the reach of the Russian police." Poor Kropótkin! In less than two years his hope was realized, but not in the way we then anticipated. I had hardly returned to my home in the United States when the Eastern Review of St. Petersburg, a newspaper devoted to the interests and the news of Asiatic Russia, made the following brief announcement:
"On the 25th of July, about nine o'clock in the evening, Prince A. A. Kropótkin committed suicide in Tomsk by shooting himself with a revolver. He had been in administrative exile about ten
