d violence, striking him dead to the
ground, finishing the wounded man and practically annihilating the empty
sledge in the twinkling of an eye. With a yell of horror the crowd broke
up and fled in all directions, except for those who fell dead or dying
where they stood nearest to the Minister-President, and one or two
others who did not fall till they had run a little way.

The first explosion had brought together a crowd as if by enchantment,
the second made as swiftly a solitude in the street for hundreds of
yards in each direction. Through the falling snow people looked from
afar at the small heap of dead bodies lying upon each other near the
carcases of the two horses. Nobody dared to approach till some Cossacks
of a street-patrol galloped up and, dismounting, began to turn over the
dead. Amongst the innocent victims of the second explosion laid out on
the pavement there was a body dressed in a peasant's sheepskin coat; but
the face was unrecognisable, there was absolutely nothing found in the
pockets of its poor clothing, and it was the only one whose identity was
never established.

That day Mr. Razumov got up at his usual hour and spent the morning
within the University buildings listening to the lectures and working
for some time in the library. He heard the first vague rumour of
something in the way of bomb-throwing at the table of the students'
ordinary, where he was accustomed to eat his two o'clock dinner. But
this rumour was made up of mere whispers, and this was Russia, where
it was not always safe, for a student especially, to appear too much
interested in certain kinds of whispers. Razumov was one of those
men who, living in a period of mental and political unrest, keep an
instinctive hold on normal, practical, everyday life. He was aware
of the emotional tension of his time; he even responded to it in an
indefinite way. But his main concern was with his work, his studies, and
with his own future.

Officially and in fact without a family (for the daughter of the
Archpriest had long been dead), no home influences had shaped his
opinions or his feelings. He was as lonely in the world as a man
swimming in the deep sea. The word Razumov was the mere label of
a solitary individuality. There were no Razumovs belonging to him
anywhere. His closest parentage was defined in the statement that he
was a Russian. Whatever good he expected from life would be given to or
withheld from his hopes by that connexion a