the previous year, to undertake a journey of four thousand miles alone, in order to join him at the mines and marry him, when she received a telegram from Captain Nikólin briefly announcing his death. Although more than six months had elapsed since that time, she had heard nothing else. Neither Dr. Véimar before his death, nor his convict friends after his death, had been permitted to write to her, and upon me she had hung her last hopes. How hard it was for me to tell her that I might have seen him — that I might have brought her, from his death-bed, one last assurance of love and remembrance, — but that I had not done so, the reader can perhaps imagine. I have had some sad things to do in my life, but a sadder duty than this never was laid upon me.
I afterward spent a whole evening with her at her house. She related to me the story of Dr. Véimar's heroic and self-sacrificing life, read me letters that he had written to her from battlefields in Bulgaria, and finally, with a face streaming with tears, brought out and showed to me the most sacred and precious relic of him that she had — a piece of needlework that he had made in his cell at the mines, and had succeeded in smuggling through to her as a little present and a token of his continued remembrance and love. It was a strip of coarse cloth, such as that used for convict shirts, about three inches wide and nearly fifty feet in length, embroidered from end to end in tasteful geometrical patterns with the coarsest and cheapest kind of colored linen thread.
"Mr. Kennan," she said to me, trying in vain to choke down her sobs, "imagine the thoughts that have been sewn into that piece of embroidery!"
We remained at the mines of Kará four or five days after our last visit to the house of the Armfeldts, but as we were constantly under close surveillance, we could accomplish nothing. All that there is left for me to do, therefore, is to throw into systematic form the information that I obtained there, and to give a few chapters
