he lips. "I
most humbly apologize. I--I did not know. You told me nothing!"

"Perhaps you will kindly mend my passport, and give it a proper vise."

In an instant he was up from his chair, and having gathered the torn
paper from the floor, proceeded to paste it together. On the back he
endorsed that it had been torn by accident, and then gave it the proper
vise, affixing the stamps.

"I trust, Excellency," he said, bowing low as he handed it to me, "I
trust that this affair will not trouble you further. I assure you I had
no intention of insulting you."

"Yes, you had!" I said. "You insulted me merely because I am English.
But recollect in future that the man who insults an Englishman generally
pays for it, and I do not intend to let this pass. There is a higher
power in Finland than even the Governor-General."

"But, Excellency," whined the fellow who only ten minutes ago had been
such an insulting bully, "I shall lose my position. I have a wife and
six children--my wife is delicate, and my pay here is not a large one.
You will forgive, won't you, Excellency? I have apologized--I most
humbly apologize."

And he took up the letter I had given him, holding it gingerly with
trembling fingers. And well he might, for the document was headed:

"MINISTER OF THE IMPERIAL HOUSEHOLD, PALACE OF PETERHOF.

"The bearer of this is one Gordon Francis Gregg, British subject, whom
it is Our will and command that he shall be Our guest during his journey
through our dominion. And we hereby command all Governors of Provinces
and minor officials to afford him all the facilities he requires and
privileges and immunities as Our guest."

The above decree was in a neat copper-plate handwriting in Russian,
while beneath was the sprawling signature of the ruler of one hundred
and thirty millions of people, that signature that was all-powerful from
the gulf of Bothnia to the Pacific--"Nicholas."

The document was the one furnished to me a year before when, at the
invitation of the Russian Government, I had gone on a mission of inquiry
into the state of the prisons in order to see, on behalf of the British
public, whether things were as black as some writers had painted them.
It had been my intention to visit the far-off penal settlements in
Northern Siberia, but having gone through some twenty prisons in
European Russia, my health had failed and I had been compelled to return
to Italy to recuperate. The document had therefore remained