Czar. It has long been the rendezvous of political refugees of both sexes, Russians, Nihilists, Polish Liberators, French Communards, German Socialists, and Cosmopolitan Anarchists. The circle met there is composed of educated and clever people. Nearly all are excellent linguists, and more or less successful in trade, literature, or professional life. Owing probably to the terrible scenes in which they have been actors, all are more or less eccentric in behavior, speech, or ideas. Not long since a party of a dozen men and women were spending the evening in the large old-fashioned parlor. All smoked, a few sipped the vitriolic Vodka between the whiffs of their cigarettes, while all the rest assuaged thirst with the cheap wines of the Rhine and Moselle. The conversation had been political and literary rather than anecdotal in character, and had flagged until the room was almost silent. The only person speaking was a handsome Jewess of 24 or 25, whose name or nom de guerre was Theodora Ornavitsch. She was of a rare type of that race, being a superb blonde with bright golden hair, large lustrous blue eyes, and exhibiting the powerful figure and splendid health which characterize the Hebrew women to so remarkable a degree. As she paused at the end of an argument and drained a glass of Josephshoefer, some one asked, 'What made you a Nihilist, Dora?'
"'Nothing very remarkable to us Russians,' she replied. 'I belong to a good family in a small town in the Warsaw Province. I married the Rabbi of our Synagogue, and we were very happy for a few months. The Czar then made a change, and sent down a new governor from St. Petersburg to replace our old one, who was a good and just man, although a Russian general. The new comer had every vice, and no virtue of any kind. He was so bad and cruel that our friends and relatives wrote us when he came warning us against him. My husband the next Sabbath, in the Synagogue, told our people about him, and advised them to be over cautious in not violating any one of the thousand tyrannical laws with which we were cursed. Though he spoke in Hebrew, for fear of spies, someone betrayed him to the governor. He was arrested, tried, flogged on the public square into insensibility, and sent to Siberia for life. I was present when he underwent his agony, and stood it until I became crazed. I broke through the crowd toward the wretch of an official, and cursed him and his master, the Czar, and swore vengeance against both. I, too, was arrested, tried at court-martial, and sentenced to receive a hundred blows with the rod in the public square. I, a woman, was taken by drunken Moujiks and heathen Cossacks to the place, tied by my hands to the whipping post, my clothing torn from my body to the waist, and beaten before all the