ering 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.

How far we proud islanders must have forsaken for a time the road to
nobleness when we are able to exalt the saying "A full purse is the only
true friend" into a representative English proverb! We do not rage and
foam as Timon did--that would be ill-bred and ludicrous; we simply smile
and utter delicate mockeries. In the plays that best please our golden
youth nothing is so certain to win applause and laughter as a sentence
about the treachery or greed of friends. Do those grinning,
superlatively insolent cynics really represent the mighty Mother of
Nations? Ah, no! If even the worst of them were thrust away into some
region where life was hard for him, he would show something like
nobility and manliness; it is the mephitic airs of ease and luxury that
breed selfishness and scorn in his soul. At any rate, those effeminate
people are not typical specimens of our steadfast friendly race. When
the folk in the colliery village hear that deadly thud and feel the
shudder of the earth which tell of disaster, Jack the hewer rushes to
th