night and went to school by day, and
when only nineteen, while one of the chief operators in Cincinnati, he
applied for leave to join an expedition for laying a cable from Alaska
to Siberia by way of Bering Strait. He was asked if he could get ready
to start in two weeks, and he answered that he could get ready to start
in two hours. He was appointed, and in this way he came to know the
horrors which he afterwards studied more fully in a second visit to
Siberia. He traveled fifteen hundred miles through that wintry prison
of Russia, and saw and heard the sorrowful things which the despotism of
the Czar has done to men who dare to love freedom.

His report of these cruelties has at least put their authors to shame
before the civilized world, if it has not wrought so great an open
change as the work of another Ohio man in dealing with even greater
atrocities. It is interesting to note that Januarius A. Mac-Gahan
was born in the same county as Philip H. Sheridan, of the same Irish
parentage, to the same Catholic religion, and the same early poverty. He
saw the light in July, 1844, in a log cabin on his father's little farm
among the woods near New Lexington in Perry County. He studied hard at
school, and read constantly out of school, when a boy. When a little
older, he worked for the neighboring farmers; he hoped to get a school
to teach; but he could not get it in his own home, where he was thought
too young, and he had to go to Indiana for it. From there he went to
St Louis, where he became a newspaper reporter. In 1868 he sailed for
Europe to study French and German, hoping to come home and practice law
in that city. But his duty as correspondent took him to the scenes of
various European wars, and launched him at last amidst the barbaric
outrages of the Turks in Bulgaria. His exposure of their abominable
misdeeds in 1876 roused the whole world; the English government
officially examined his facts and found them indisputable. The war began
between Russia and Turkey, and MacGahan returned to Bulgaria with the
victorious Russian troops. There, wherever the people knew him, they
hailed him as their savior. He had made their miseries so widely known
to mankind as to render it impossible that they should continue. It
is not strange that they thronged upon him, and kissed his hands, his
boots, his saddle, his horse. In the peace that followed, a whole empire
was torn from the bloody hands of the Turks, and four Christian peop