head with a pistol. Her husband was devotedly attached to her; and her death, under such circumstances and in such a way, was a terrible blow to him. In his letter to me he referred to a copy of James Russell Lowell's poems that I had caused to be sent to him, and said that in reading "After the Burial" he vividly realized for the first time that grief is of no nationality: the lines, although written by a bereaved American, expressed the deepest thoughts and feelings of a bereaved Russian. He sent me with his letter a small, worn, leather match-box, which had been given by Prince Pierre Kropótkin to his exiled brother Alexander; which the latter had left to Volkhófski; and which Volkhófski had in turn presented to his wife a short time before her death. He hoped, he said, that it would have some value to me, on account of its association with the lives of four political offenders, all of whom I had known. One of them was a refugee in London, another was an exile in Tomsk, and two had escaped the jurisdiction of the Russian Government by taking their own lives.
I tried to read Volkhófski's letter aloud to my wife; but as I recalled the high character and lovable personality of the writer, and imagined what this last blow of fate must have been to such a man,—in exile, in broken health, and with three helpless children wholly dependent upon him,—the written lines vanished in a mist of tears, and with a choking in my throat I put the letter and the little match-box away.
By means of secret prearranged addresses in Russia and in the United States, I succeeded in maintaining a desultory and precarious correspondence with Mr. Volkhófski until 1889. In the spring of that year I received from him two short letters filled with tidings of misfortune, and then—nothing more. The two letters were, in part, as follows:
Tomsk, February 14, 1889.
My dear George Ivánovich:
I write you a few lines first to tell you how weary I am of waiting for a letter from you (although I know that you have not written
