forced to be almost an eye-witness of the assassination of her dearest friend. A young man of English descent named Beverly, whom she had known from childhood, had been arrested shortly before upon the charge of living on a false passport and carrying on a revolutionary propaganda, and he was at that time in the Kiev prison. The night before Mrs. Cherniávski was to resume her journey to Siberia, Beverly, with a comrade named Izbítski, attempted to escape through a tunnel which they had succeeded in digging from their cell to a point outside the prison wall. The prison authorities, however, had in some way become aware of the existence of the tunnel, and had posted a squad of soldiers near the place where the fugitives must emerge from the ground. Late at night, when they made their appearance, they were received with a volley of musketry. Beverly was mortally wounded, and as he lay writhing on the ground he was despatched by a soldier with repeated bayonet-thrusts. Izbítski, wounded and severely beaten, was taken back into prison. The next morning when Mrs. Cherniávski started with her party for Siberia she had to march past the bloody and disfigured body of her dearest friend, which was still lying where it had fallen, in plain sight of the prison windows.
"I can bear my own personal torment," she said to me with a sob as she finished the story of this tragedy, "but such things as that break my heart."
I need not recount the hardships and miseries that she, a cultivated and refined woman, endured on the road and in the roadside étapes between Kiev and the small town in the Siberian province of Tobólsk where she and her husband had been assigned a residence. They reached their destination at last; a child was there born to them, and they lived there in something like comfort until March, 1881, when Alexander III. came to the throne and Mr. Cherniávski was required to take the oath of allegiance. He refused to do so, and they were sent farther eastward to the town of
