tered mujik, as indeed he
was.

And yet already he had become the most renowned man in the Russian
capital!

Our Empire's quarrel with Japan had not been finally settled. The country
was in a state of serious unrest. While the revolutionary spirit, started
by the death of the girl Vietroff, was seething everywhere, the dynasty
was threatened on every hand. Yet the ever-open eye of the Okhrana was
upon everyone, and arrests of innocent persons were still continuing.

That night the salon of the Countess Ignatieff was responsible for much
concerning the downfall of the Romanoffs. In the great luxurious
drawing-room there were assembled beneath the huge crystal electroliers a
curious, mixed company of the pious and the vicious of the capital. There
was the Metropolitan in his robes and with his great crucifix, Ministers
of State in uniforms with decorations, Actual Privy Councillors and their
wives, and dozens of underlings in their gaudy tinsel, prelates with
crosses at their necks, and women of all classes, from the highest
aristocracy to the painted sister of the higher demi-monde.

The gathering was characteristic of Petrograd in those times of Russia's
decadence, when Germany was preparing for war. The fight with Japan had
already been engineered through Kouropatkine as a preliminary to the
betrayal and smashing of our Empire.

Of the conflict with the Mikado I have no concern. My pen is taken up in
order to reveal what I know regarding the astounding plots conceived in
Potsdam and executed in Petrograd, in order fearlessly to expose those
who were traitors to their country, and to whom the _debacle_ of 1917 was
due.

In that great well-lit saloon, crowded by religious personages of all
kinds, the old Dowager Countess Ignatieff, in stiff black silk, came
forward to receive the popular Starets as the newest star in Russia's
religious firmament. With Stuermer behind him to advise and to plot, aided
by an obscure civil servant named Protopopoff--who afterwards became
Minister of the Interior and a spy of Germany--the "saint" never held
himself cheap. That was one of the secrets of his astounding career.
Though he possessed no education and could scarcely trace his own name,
he possessed the most acute brain of any lawyer or banker in Petrograd.
In every sense he was abnormal, just as abnormal as Joan of Arc, Saint
Anthony, Saint Francis, or a dozen others who have been beatified.

The rheumatic old countess, afte