--ladies, as well as gentlemen--may have had personal experience.
A correspondent has given the following description:--The suspected
person, who could not be brought to trial, but whom it was intended to
castigate, would be invited to call at the Office of the Secret Police.
After a few moments' conversation with the dread functionary, the floor
would suddenly sink beneath the visitor's feet, and he would find
himself suspended by the waist, all that part of the body below it being
under the floor, and concealed from view. Then invisible hands and
equally invisible rods would rapidly perform their duty--the trap-door
would rise again--and the visitor would be bowed out with great
courtesy, and go home, carrying with him substantial marks to remind him
of his interview.

Though this more than Oriental custom has been abolished, enough remains
of barbarity to explain why successive chiefs of the hated police
Hermandad--Trepoff, Mesentzoff, and Drentelen--should have been the mark
of the bullet of popular revenge. A Russian writer says:--

"A history of the secret doings, of all the horrors and crimes
perpetrated by this disgraceful institution, would fill up many
volumes, before the contents of which the most sensational novels
would appear tame and shallow. There is scarcely any sphere of
public or private life which is exempted from the irresponsible
control of this Inquisition of the nineteenth century. The verdict
of a Court has no value whatever for the Third Section. Not only
acquitted political offenders are as a rule transported,
administratively, to some distant town of the Empire, but even the
judges themselves, when they are considered to have passed too
lenient a verdict, are liable to be forced into resigning their
office, and to be then _exiled in company with the very prisoners
who had stood before them_!"

Lest this description should appear to be overdrawn, I may quote from
the letter of the St. Petersburg correspondent of an English journal,
which is certainly not unfavourable to the Government of Alexander II.
The letter was written after the recent proclamation of a state of
siege. And the writer says:--

"As proofs and instances, not so much of martial law as of the
repressive measures adopted (in many cases by ordinary
administrative agency, without the machinery of martial law), I may
mention that at the presen