hich there were, it seemed, six
or seven. From the rear there was constant firing, and the streets in
the vicinity were, I saw to my horror, already filled with dead and
wounded. I wondered why Count Bindo should come there--except, perhaps,
that the Countess owned certain jewels that my master intended to
handle. Women were wailing over husbands, lovers, brothers; men over
their daughters and wives. Even children of tender age were lying
helpless and wounded, some of them shattered and dead.

Ah! that sight was sickening. It was wholesale butchery.

Above us bullets whistled as the Cossacks came suddenly round a side
street and made a desperate attack upon the barricade I had entered only
a few minutes before. A dozen of those fighting for their freedom fell
back dead at my feet at the first volley. They had been on top of the
barricade, offering a mark to the troops of the Czar. Before us and
behind us there was firing, for behind was another barricade. We were,
in fact, between two deadly fires.

Revolver in hand, I stood ready to defend my own life. In those exciting
moments I disregarded the danger I ran from being struck in that
veritable hail of lead. Men fell wounded all around me, and there was
blood everywhere. A thin, dark-haired young fellow under thirty--a
Moscow student I subsequently heard--seemed to be the ringleader, for
above the firing could be heard his shouts of encouragement.

"Fight, my comrades!" he cried, standing close to me and waving the red
flag he carried--the emblem of the Terror. "Down with the Czar! Kill the
vermin he sends to us! Long live freedom! Kill them!" he shrieked. "They
have killed your wives and daughters. Men of Ostrog, remember your duty
to-day. Set an example to Russia. Do not let the Moscow fiasco be
repeated here. Fight! Fight on as long as you have a drop of life-blood
in you, and we shall win, we shall win. Down with the Autocrat! Down
with the----"

His sentence was never finished, for at that instant he reeled
backwards, with half his face shot away by a Cossack bullet.

The situation was, for me, one of greatest peril. The whole place was in
open revolt, and when the troops broke down the defences, as I saw they
must do sooner or later, then we should all be caught in a trap, and no
quarter would be given.

The massacre would be the same as at Moscow, and many other towns
in Eastern Russia, wherein the populace had been shot down
indiscriminately, and officia