lower orders” noble friendships are by no means uncommon.  “I can’t bear that look on your face, Bill.  I’m coming to save you or go with you!” said a rough sailor as he sprang into a raging sea to help his shipmate.  “I’m coming, old fellow!” shouted the mate of a merchant-vessel; and he dived overboard among the mountainous seas that were rolling south of Cape Horn one January.  For an hour this hero fought with the blinding water, and he saved his comrade at last.  Strange to say, the lounging impassive dandies who regard the universe with a yawn, and who sneer at the very notion of friendship, develop the kindly and manly virtues when they are removed from the enervating atmosphere of Society and forced to lead a hard life.  A man to whom emotion, passion, self-sacrifice, are things to be mentioned with a curl of the lip, departs on a campaign, and amid squalor, peril, and grim horrors he becomes totally unselfish.  Men who have watched our splendid military officers in the field are apt to think that a society which converts such generous souls into self-seeking fribbles must be merely poisonous.  The more we study the subject the more clearly we can see that where luxury flourishes friendship withers.  In the vast suffering Russian nation friendships are at this very moment cherished to the heroic pitch.  A mighty people are awakening, as it were, from sleep; the wicked and corrupt still sit in high places, but among the weltering masses of the populace purity and nobleness are spreading, and such friendships are fostered as never have been shadowed forth in story or song.  Sophie Peroffsky mounts the scaffold with four other doomed mortals; she never thinks of her own approaching agony—­she only longs to comfort her friends and she kisses them and greets them with cheering words until the last dread moment arrives.  Poor little Marie Soubotine—­sweetest of perverted children, noblest of rebels—­refuses to purchase her own safety by uttering a word to betray her sworn friend.  For three years she lingers on in an underground dungeon, and then she is sent on the wild road to Siberia; she dies amid gloom and deep suffering, but no torture can unseal her lips; she gladly gives her life to save another’s.  Antonoff endures the torture, but no agony can make him prove false to his friends.  When his captors give him a respite from the thumbscrews and the red-hot wires that are thrust under his nails, he forgets his own torment, and scratches on his plate his cipher signals to his comrades.  Those men and women in that awful country are lawless and dangerous, but they are heroic, and they are true friends one to another.