ple. Zweig sat down in a tiny hut, with a wooden bench for a bed and fish-bladder window-panes, and created a government out of nothing at all but his own inclination. He called together several of the more intelligent Jews, injected a little of his spirit and courage into them, and formed a governing committee which decreed that lawlessness must stop. Lawlessness stopped, Heaven knows why. A slight tap on the head would have ended Zweig, the forest would bury him, and certainly the Russian Government would hardly have exerted itself to catch the murderer. Zweig appreciated this fact fully, but it apparently made no difference to him. Having fully established his government when I saw him, he was founding a public school for the children, and asked me to send him the proper books. He knew the history and needs of every person under his self-constituted protection, and did wonders with the three thousand dollars I was able to allow him monthly for the relief of the Austrian Jews.

Children in the exile districts seem grotesquely misplaced, yet there were many. Some times the gendarmes' magic would lift a father from his too liberal fireside in Russia, and set him down without the

humiliation of a trial in the glorious Narym solitude. Not infrequently his family followed him in order to share the new life, for, as elsewhere, fathers are loved in Russia. Particularly among educated men the continual, unrelieved loneliness tended to bring on insanity. I knew one fine business man, a millionaire of Kieff, and a direct descendent of Rouget de Lisle, whose little daughter came into exile with him to save him from this dreaded loneliness. She was fourteen years old, and they lived in a dreary village by the great river, in a log cabin with pink chintz curtains and a piano. She was a winning little thing, with happy, brown eyes and long curls, and to all appearances was no whit the worse for her exile existence. The fascinating life of the forest was familiar to her, the birds and flowers, and her father cared for her French and history. What a bright spot she was in that wretched place, and what a curious life for a little girl whose illustrious forefather had composed the "Marseillaise"! Her mother, who joined them later when her health would permit and they had gained permission to live in a town on the railway, was a sister of Mme. Curie. The despicable, treason-rotten old régime in Russia respected nothing on earth but

their own inexplicable, worthless, debased wishes.

How plainly one read among the exiles the pleasing tale of czardom's God-given wisdom! In Narym village I found a boy of twelve who had been deported from the Riga front nearly five thousand miles. away because he was suspected of espionage. He was just a plain, pug-nosed little peasant boy who did n't know two dozen German words and was wholly ignorant about everything pertaining to the war except that it had robbed him of his home and parents and hurled him to the desolate ends of the earth. Officials had received orders to round up a certain number of "spies" in his village, and he happened to get mixed with the unfortunate wretches. That, at any rate, is as near as I could get to an explanation of his presence there. Evidently he had been caught by accident in the terrible net of official displeasure which never recognized or rectified a mistake. Had not the old Russian world crumbled to dust, that boy would in all likelihood have been forced to spend the rest of his life there, for he had no one to intercede for him.

In the same village was an aged Russian whose lower limbs had been entirely paralyzed for years and who was stonedeaf. He had been exiled in that condi

tion on a charge of fomenting revolutionary plots. I could not get his story, for he was insane when I found him lying helpless and indescribably filthy in the corner of a stable, kept alive by a kind old Russian who brought him food.

Such were the more tragic human driftwood lying in the stagnant back-waters of Narym. But even the jungle has its humor, and exile society afforded some ludicrous, if pathetic, characters. There was the "Baron" of Narym, whose toes and elbows continually got the better of his delinquent costume. His speech and manners made it quite obvious that whatever his pre-exile condition, high life had played only a visionary part in it; but he clung to his false title despite all ridicule. The baron deigned to call on me, and sent a savage, half-naked little scrap of an Ostiak boy ahead to announce his visit. His salient points as he appeared were a rusty Prince Albert coat, a rubber collar, and an elaborate Spanish bow. He addressed me as Excellency and intimated that he came to beg a favor.

"Pray be so kind," he said, "as to purchase this slight list of articles and forward them to me." Presenting a fair sheet of paper, he bowed himself out. He wanted fifty cents' worth of calomel and half a dozen safety-razor blades.

Not all the exiles were Russian subJects or enemy aliens. I found the wife of an American citizen in the remotest of the villages, where she had been kept for two years, for no reason at all, according to her own statement. Also at a horrible little nest of cutthroats called Parabel I found an Italian named Giovanoni. Poor young fellow, he was tall and dark, with Dante's own nose and the eyes of a Sicilian. He was starved and ragged. An old Ruthenian doctor of philosophy, who apparently had no idea why he was there, and Giovanoni were about the only harmless men in the village. The police supervision was most ineffective here, and the day I arrived had witnessed violent street fighting at dawn with knives and axes. The jail was filled, and extra rooms had been requisitioned for the overflow of prisoners. Giovanoni was full of these simple events when he came to see me. He spoke the typical English of “Little Italy," which is difficult to reproduce. He had traveled widely in his short, but thrilling, life.

"I hava beena everywhere," he burst forth-"everywhere a gentleman can go, but unteel I coma here I hava omit som'ting vera important: I hava not visit the hell before. Here is our prison always full. Only in the jail can the gentlemen of Parabel gamble with safety. At all other places they may be robbed by their friends who do not play. So long as they have the money they remain in jail. When it is gona, they coma out and steal again and go back to their prison. Here am I not loved, I am not trusted: I hava not yet beena in the jail!"

"I am surprised to meet an Italian here," I hazarded.

"The Italian heemself is surprised. It was all quite most unexpected. I am engineer. I have study at Turino and Milano. Before the war I work with Russians at railway construction in the eastern Siberia. When Italy begina to fight I go to chief engineer and say I will return to my countree and fight also; so please give me my money. He say it can not be. Russia need engineers; I must

I shall not.

I

stay. I reply I am Italian. I am Italian; I go where I please; I go at once. I am Italian. He tell me he maka me work. He is officer of the czar. Without his permission I may not mova one little inch. I may not go to fight. Then I lose the temper at once, and like a fool I say once more I am Italian. pulla the damn' czar's nosa. I am Italian. I fight when I want to. I call him and his czar a dog, a pig, a long-leg' stork. I maka him verra angry, too, and I go to my house. At midnight four men coma and pull me from the bed. 'Giovanoni,' they say, 'you are now the exile.' I reply it is not true; but it is true. I am put in the prison, I am robbed, I am sent here. I have write to our ambassador at Petrograd. He is the donkey, yet maybe he never hava the letter. To get angry was great mistaka. In Paris there is the automata. You drop in the five centimes and geta the pastry, in Russia you swear at the czar and get the exile. It is just so easy.”

Another strange paradox was the case of an immensely wealthy merchant of Vladivostok. This man held the rank of general. He was certainly one of the greatest business organizers in Russia and had spread a vast system of stores over Siberia. In Vladivostok he had strong business rivals, and when the war began they seized their opportunity to crush him. He employed many Germans and had large business dealings with Germany. Some of his children had been educated in Germany. Whether he was guilty of any treason or not no one knows, but in twenty-four hours he was arrested and exiled to the Narym district. One of his two sons was in the German army, for he had settled in Germany. The other was a captain in the Russian army. The general was more than sixty years old, a short, slight man, highly intelligent, and bowed, but not crushed, by his misfortune. From the desolate village where he lived with a Chinese servant he was gamely carrying on a fight to expose his enemies and clear himself. The son in Germany had long been estranged from him, but the one in the Russian army he worshiped.

While his father was suffering in exile his son led a charge in Galicia, was killed, and buried with the Cross of St. George on his breast. The general's fellow-exiles kept the news from him for a week, fearing the blow would kill him. When at last he was told he said nothing, but sent a telegram to the governor of the province, the contents of which came to my knowledge: "While his innocent father was suffering undeserved disgrace, in exile, my son has done his duty as a soldier of Russia and given his life for the fatherland. Such injustice can not endure." Four months later the governor was himself in prison, and to-day the governor's emperor sits in exile.

Under the old Russian régime there seemed to be no such thing as a logic of events. Situations did not so much happen as explode into being with a disconcerting suddenness. Such disorganization as permeated the so-called system of justice wronged innumerable people, but by the same token sometimes real justice was served by this very looseness and irresponsibility of the gendarme system. The whole course of an exile's existence might be turned by the slightest incident that brought him the displeasure or the good-will of his uniformed masters. I knew in Siberia a Ruthenian musician and writer upon whom the mere accident of Austrian birth had brought down the uncompromising hand of official displeasure, but whose own wits came to his rescue in a remarkable manner. This man's name is doubtless not unknown to many musiclovers in this country, for he had made two extensive tours in America. He is a violinist of rare charm and a composer of

some note.

When war began this B was a professor in the conservatory at Kieff, where he was well known and popular. When the Germans swept over Warsaw and even Kieff was disturbed with rumors of impending disaster, a proclamation was issued forcing all enemy aliens to leave the city within a few hours. The musician went at once to see the mayor, his personal friend, who told him an exception might

be made in his case if he wished to remain. B replied that he thought it would be best for him to retire farther eastward to Rostoff, on the Don, in order to allay any suspicion that might be attached to him if he remained near the military zone. Rostoff being a city of extensive industries and much prosperity, it became the Mecca for the thousands of enemy subjects and refugees who were fleeing the ever-widening military area. When the professor arrived there he found the town flooded with these people and the authorities anything but kindly disposed. Despite introductions from his Russian friends in Kieff he was arrested and thrown into prison, all his papers being taken from him. Circumstances had forced him to leave Kieff not exactly penniless, but with insufficient money to last any great length of time. Some of this went at once for bribes to secure a few of the slightest comforts in his cell, where he languished several days before he was called before a police official of rather high rank. Beside being an accomplished musician, B— is

student of human nature, and as he himself is of the purest Slav blood, knows a great deal about the subtleties of the Russian mind. This knowledge was his only resource now, for he had not sufficient funds to move so exalted a breast to compassion.

"When a gendarme came to fetch me to that official's office," he told me, "I had no idea what I was to do or what would be done to me. I knew he would never believe my story as to my voluntarily leaving Kieff, and I had no hope that he would trouble to make an investigation there. He would rather exile me at once to some remote place in Siberia as quite the easiest way to get rid of me. His anteroom was crowded with bedraggled Germans and Austrians waiting to be haled before him on various accounts. Many of them were doubtless guilty, but I felt sure that no great discernment would be exercised to discriminate between them and such as myself. We were a hopeless-looking lot.

"When my turn came, a common gen

darme seized me by the arm and shoved me through the door into the inner office. There were several clerks and minor officials sitting about, and at the end of the room, on a low dais, sat my imposing judge. He looked like a lion, with his remarkably high brow, iron-gray hair flowing to his shoulders, and quite the haughtiest nose I ever saw. My first glance at him gave me an inspiration. Despite the fact that my appearance just then was far from prepossessing, I broke away from the gendarme and rushed eagerly to him, speaking in French.

"Ah, my dear M'sieur V,' I cried, 'can it be true! Mon Dieu, what changes the war has brought! To think that I should meet you here just when I so need a friend. Ah, those happy days in Brussels! But when did you leave? Only at the beginning of the war, I think. Cher maître, who would have believed that you'

"The official looked at me in blank amazement; but he was obviously pleased to be addressed in French, and replied in the same language, with the vilest possible

accent:

"Perhaps you are mistaken. You see before you his Majesty's loyal servant. I have been for years--'

"Come, my friend, I pray you do not play with me now. You are most certainly M. V, gifted director of the Brussels conservatory. Could I be mistaken in those eyes and that hair? It is not possible. No man in Europe is like you. But I see you have forgotten me, of course, your humble pupil. Try to remember B———, who studied there with you and who used to speak Russian with you when he was homesick. You surely recall that day when-'

"Each instant he grew more pleased and important, and then began to chuckle. Suddenly he grew stern and terrible and ordered all his underlings out of the room, swearing at them horribly, and saying I was a most important case, to be dealt with by him alone. So soon as they were gone, I continued:

"Is it possible, M'sieur, that I am mis

taken? Do not tell me I have been so stupidly joyful. You are joking. You are Monsieur V, is it not so? I could not fail to know my old master.'

"I don't know if you are truthful,' he answered, looking at me doubtfully, 'but are you truly a musician?'

"'M'sieur, it is my whole life. I have studied in many countries. I came here from the conservatory at Kieff. I was arrested I know not why. Everything was taken from me, even my violin. I did not know what to do, and then I was brought to you, whom I immediately thought I recognized as the famous Russian musician, my old friend, Monsieur Vknown throughout Europe and even in America, where I, too, have played.'

"He suddenly rose and interrupted me.' "Now I cannot talk more with you. I want you to go out that side door and down some stairs to a street, where you will find my carriage waiting. Tell my coachman to drive you to this address, where you will find comfortable rooms at your disposal. Your luggage will be returned to you there. Please make yourself comfortable; but I beg of you do not try to go out upon the streets until I call for you this evening at seven.'

"I wasted no time, but at the door he called me back, and there was a funny look in his eyes, just like a Russian boy's."

""Tell me truly, M'sieur, do I really resemble the director of the conservatory of Brussels?' he said.

""To the very life. And I believe you are the only man on earth who looks like him. It is remarkable.' I confess that I began to feel a little ashamed of myself, he seemed so flattered.

""This evening there will be a party at my home. I am going to bring you. You will play, and we shall talk over things there. Au revoir.'

"I had no idea what I was in for, but in any case it was much better than the jail, so I obeyed him gladly. In a short time my luggage and my violin were returned to me, and for the rest of the day I had a most enjoyable sleep. My official friend appeared promptly at seven in his