ld to the public weal. As to the second
article of the proclamation, the order of expulsion which it contained
admitted of no evasion either. It only concerned foreigners of Asiatic
origin, but these could do nothing but pack up their merchandise and
go back the way they came. As to the mountebanks, of which there were a
considerable number, they had nearly a thousand versts to go before they
could reach the nearest frontier. For them it was simply misery.

At first there rose against this unusual measure a murmur of
protestation, a cry of despair, but this was quickly suppressed by the
presence of the Cossacks and agents of police. Immediately, what might
be called the exodus from the immense plain began. The awnings in front
of the stalls were folded up; the theaters were taken to pieces;
the fires were put out; the acrobats' ropes were lowered; the old
broken-winded horses of the traveling vans came back from their sheds.
Agents and soldiers with whip or stick stimulated the tardy ones, and
made nothing of pulling down the tents even before the poor Bohemians
had left them.

Under these energetic measures the square of Nijni-Novgorod would, it
was evident, be entirely evacuated before the evening, and to the tumult
of the great fair would succeed the silence of the desert.

It must again be repeated--for it was a necessary aggravation of these
severe measures--that to all those nomads chiefly concerned in the order
of expulsion even the steppes of Siberia were forbidden, and they would
be obliged to hasten to the south of the Caspian Sea, either to Persia,
Turkey, or the plains of Turkestan. The post of the Ural, and the
mountains which form, as it were, a prolongation of the river along the
Russian frontier, they were not allowed to pass. They were therefore
under the necessity of traveling six hundred miles before they could
tread a free soil.

Just as the reading of the proclamation by the head of the police
came to an end, an idea darted instinctively into the mind of Michael
Strogoff. "What a singular coincidence," thought he, "between this
proclamation expelling all foreigners of Asiatic origin, and the words
exchanged last evening between those two gipsies of the Zingari race.
'The Father himself sends us where we wish to go,' that old man said.
But 'the Father' is the emperor! He is never called anything else among
the people. How could those gipsies have foreseen the measure taken
against them? how could