to speak.  ’It is cruel and unjust.  I have committed no crime.  I—­’ I saw something quiver in his white young throat, from which I could not take my eyes, and he stopped.  Yes.  At that moment I hear Rozovsky shouting in his fine, Jewish voice.  Lozinsky threw away the cigarette and stepped from the door.  And Rozovsky appeared at the window.  His childish face, with the limpid black eyes, was red and moist.  He also had clean linen on, the trousers were too wide, and he kept pulling them up and trembled all over.  He approached his pitiful face to my window.  ’Kryltzoff, it’s true that the doctor has prescribed cough mixture for me, is it not?  I am not well.  I’ll take some more of the mixture.’  No one answered, and he looked inquiringly, now at me, now at the inspector.  What he meant to say I never made out.  Yes.  Suddenly the assistant again put on a stern expression, and called out in a kind of squeaking tone:  ‘Now, then, no nonsense.  Let us go.’  Rozovsky seemed incapable of understanding what awaited him, and hurried, almost ran, in front of him all along the corridor.  But then he drew back, and I could hear his shrill voice and his cries, then the trampling of feet, and general hubbub.  He was shrieking and sobbing.  The sounds came fainter and fainter, and at last the door rattled and all was quiet.  Yes.  And so they hanged them.  Throttled them both with a rope.  A watchman, another one, saw it done, and told me that Lozinsky did not resist, but Rozovsky struggled for a long time, so that they had to pull him up on to the scaffold and to force his head into the noose.  Yes.  This watchman was a stupid fellow.  He said:  ’They told me, sir, that it would be frightful, but it was not at all frightful.  After they were hanged they only shrugged their shoulders twice, like this.’  He showed how the shoulders convulsively rose and fell.  ’Then the hangman pulled a bit so as to tighten the noose, and it was all up, and they never budged."’ And Kryltzoff repeated the watchman’s words, “Not at all frightful,” and tried to smile, but burst into sobs instead.

For a long time after that he kept silent, breathing heavily, and repressing the sobs that were choking him.

“From that time I became a revolutionist.  Yes,” he said, when he was quieter and finished his story in a few words.  He belonged to the Narodovoltzy party, and was even at the head of the disorganising group, whose object was to terrorise the government so that it should give up its power of its own accord.  With this object he travelled to Petersburg, to Kiev, to Odessa and abroad, and was everywhere successful.  A man in whom he had full confidence betrayed him.  He was arrested, tried, kept in prison for two years, and condemned to death, but the sentence was mitigated to one of hard labour for life.

He went into consumption while in prison, and in the conditions he was now placed he had scarcely more than a few months longer to live.  This he knew, but did not repent of his action, but said that if he had another life he would use it in the same way to destroy the conditions in which such things as he had seen were possible.