ence to Irkutsk, and then over the ice of Lake Baikal,
and through the awful frozen desert of the Trans-Baikal Provinces,
they had been driven like cattle until the remnant that had survived
the horrors of the awful journey reached the desolate valley of the
Kara and were finally halted at the Lower Diggings.

Of nearly three hundred strong and well-fed men who had said good-bye
to liberty at the Pillar of Farewells, only a hundred and twenty
pallid and emaciated wretches stood shivering in their rags and
chains when the muster was called on the morning after their arrival
at Kara. Mazanoff and his escort had carried out their part of the
sentence of Natas to the letter. The arctic blasts from the Tundras,
the forced march, the chain and the scourge had done their work, and
more than half the exile-convicts had found in nameless graves along
the road respite from the long horrors of the fate which awaited the
survivors.

The first name called in the last muster was Alexander Romanoff.
"Here," came in a deep hollow tone from the gaunt and ragged wreck of
the giant who twelve months before had been the stateliest figure in
the brilliant galaxy of European Royalty.

"Your sentence is hard labour in the mines for"--The last word was
never spoken, for ere it was uttered the tall and still erect form of
the dethroned Autocrat suddenly shrank together, lurched forward, and
fell with a choking gasp and a clash of chains upon the hard-trampled
snow. A stream of blood rushed from his white, half-open lips, and
when they went to raise him he was dead.

If ever son of woman died of a broken heart it was Alexander
Romanoff, last of the tyrants of Russia. Never had the avenging hand
of Nemesis, though long-delayed, fallen with more precise and
terrible justice. On the very spot on which thousands of his subjects
and fellow-creatures, innocent of all crime save a desire for
progress, had worn out their lives in torturing toil to provide the
gold that had gilded his luxury, he fell as the Idol fell of old in
the temple of Dagon.

He had seen the blasting of his highest hopes in the hour of their
apparent fruition. He had beheld the destruction of his army and the
ruin of his dynasty. He had seen kindred and friends and faithful
servants sink under the nameless horrors of a fate he could do
nothing to alleviate, and with the knowledge that nothing but death
could release them from it, and now at the last moment death had
snatched