no longer endure the ceaseless miseries nature on
me, the unhappy one, heaped. I die thinking of my
Mary.

           Yours, with all heart's gratitude,

                                      WILHELM KRUMPHOLTZ.

The temptation to suicide had probably come
upon him as he was shaving; for half his beard
was shaved, and half not. He lingered in the
hospital a week. At the sad week's end, he
died, and was buried by the parish. I placed
a memorial stone over the humble grave of the
ill-starred little writing-master.

Now far away from the quiet grave where the
dandelions expand their transitory sunny disks,
bear me, my memory to noisier and gayer
scenes! Conduct me quick to the Cafe Restaurant
a la Cagmaggerie, where the black-spotted
dominoes bustle, and the red and white billiard
balls knock their heads together, on the green
tables; where the omelette smokes and the
chocolate froths; where the brown coffee seethes,
and extraordinary soups flavour the smoky air!

There, aloft in that strange room, ascended to
by corkscrew iron stairs, and where the German
Singing Club of watchmakers and pianoforte-
makers met weekly, I first saw thee, thou strange
and dangerous Stanislas Polonsky. There, first I
talked to thee of the chivalrous days of Sobieski,
amid songs about " Father Rhine," and cries for
the three colours and German independence.

The next time I met Polonsky (who I found
to be a Polish artist) was at a French
Revolutionary Debating Club that met over a Penny
Reading Room in Windmill-street, opposite to
a public-house bearing the suspicious name of
the " Three Spies." It was about a month before
Orsini's attempt, and that great conspirator was
said to be present: though I could not identify his
pale fixed face, and heavy black beard. The chairman,
a Dr. Caesar Chose, was a tall gaunt man,
with the worn hollow face and long grey drooping
moustachios of some old general of Cuirassiers.
The debate was violent in the extreme, and, after
a speech from a ruffianly Parisian mechanic, who
had been wounded at the Barricades, and who
supported himself while he spoke on crutches, up got
Stanislas in a corner of the room and denounced
the Russian Emperor as a cloven-footed monster
who sent innocent women to perish in Siberia.
He spoke of the struggle in Russia to emancipate
the serfs, and of the efforts made by friends
of liberty there to obtain a free press. After a
long and fervid speech he sat down frothing at the
mouth like a recovered epileptic, and staggered
to the door and the fresh air.

I followed him, and he asked me to come home
with him and have a chat about Poland. I did so.
His home was a smoky dingy third floor back in
Pulteney-street: a wainscoted low-roofed room
in a house that had perhaps been a nobleman's
in Queen Anne's time. His room was strewn
with artists' properties, faded draperies, broken
casts, foils, masks. The tables were crowded
with sticky yellow bottles and squeezed-out tin
tubes of paint; while against the walls leaned
stacks of dusty sketches and studies.

We began talking of the great Russian artist
Ivanoff, and then of Russian poetry, when who
should come in but two of his Russian friends,
both characteristic specimens of the refugee.

The one was a Russian colonel who had been
dangerously wounded in the left temple at the
battle of Inslensko, and who, having since been
chased out of his country for the unpardonable
crime of being a reformer, was now in his
grand old age a poor compositor in a Holborn
printing-office, maintaining his wife honourably
on twenty shillings a week, hardly earned by
late hours and a pestilent atmosphere. A truer
gentleman I never saw, nor one more unostentatious
of his misfortunes. His companion had
been a frank young lieutenant in the Russian
navy within two years. One day, while stationed
at Kertch, he saw a German captain strike the
waiter at a cafe for not bringing him his tea and
lemon quickly enough. This fired the young
man's blood.

"Why," he said, "you Germans come out
here pretending to civilise us, and you are ten
times the barbarians we are."

The German, heated with absinthe, replied
with a blow. They fought at once, in that very
room, with sabres; and at the third blow the
Russian split his adversary's skull. That night he
fled into exile; for the German interest was strong
at court just then, and his homicide would have
been punished as cruelly as a rank murder.

They recited to me some beautiful Russian
poems. I had expected to find them poor
imitations of Byron, mere mongrel French and
German paraphrases. But I found them steeped
in local feeling, aromatic with fir scent, and
fragrant of the budding birch woods. The
following simple poem of Tewtcheff touched me
deeply, as preserving a singular local legend:

   These poor villages!
   This poor nature!
   Mother country, long suffering country,
   Dear country of the Russian people!

   The foreigner with his scornful glance
   Can not understand, can not perceive
   What gleams under, what secretly shines
   Through thy modest nakedness,

   Yet the King of Heaven, in the attire of a slave,
   Suffering under the burden of his cross,
   Long ago passed to and fro through thee, blessing
   thee,
   O, my mother country!

It is true as Tewtcheff sings, that the Russian
peasants firmly believe, and have believed for
ages, that our Saviour once passed through their
country, blessing and pitying it, in the humble
garb of a slave. Then after a short discussion
on that strange sect who believe that our Saviour,
the Emperor Napoleon, and the Emperor Paul,
are all living in concealment in Urkutsk waiting
for the millennium — a sect who believe in
purification by fire, and who, after mutilating
themselves, sometimes burn themselves on funeral
piles— we fell again on poetry, and Colonel
Stralotsky recited a beautiful poem written by I
forget whom, and called I think "The Storm."
It began: