speaking, turned to pass, for the last night, down the corridor leading
to the distant wing in which were his own rooms.

* * * * *

It was on a Monday--beginning of the working week--the morning of
October fourteenth in the year 1855, that Ivan went out into the world.
His flight was not far: merely to the other end of Moscow; but it led
into a life that he had been unable to imagine in the smallest detail.
Once there, it took him less than a week to perceive that, while his
vague hopes of companionship were scarcely to be realized, he was to
drink to its dregs his preconceived cup of unhappiness.

The four great _Corps des Cadets_, created in the mid-reign of the Iron
Czar, had been devised especially for the preparation of youthful
Russian nobility for their respective places in the military, possibly
the official, world. As it presently turned out, these great schools
were destined to become hot-beds of tyranny, intrigue, rivalry,
caste-feeling, and snobbery in their worst forms. Hence, considering the
certain future of each cadet, the Corps afforded an even more adequate
preparation for bureaucratic methods than their creator had had reason
to expect. In the Moscow institution every inmate, from its head,
Colonel Becker, to the youngest boy of the fourth class, was subject to
a government of favoritism, bribery, deceit, and the pettiest meanness,
in which was no room whatever for advancement along the lines of
conscientious work, honesty, or honor. Here prestige of birth, or
aptitude for intrigue, carried all before them; for this was, indeed,
the period of the worst mismanagement these schools were to know. In
later years the Liberator found time to look to them. At present--in the
Moscow Corps, Sitsky, "Cock" of the school, a vicious dunce of twenty,
would never be called upon to yield his position to Kashkarev, a
brilliant scholar and a thoroughly scrupulous boy of eighteen, who was
generally despised because his grandfather had been a Pole.

In this gathering, where all were in some degree noble, the distinctions
drawn by the boys themselves between lineage and wealth, political
prestige and the quiet conservatism of lofty birth, were so arbitrary,
so contradictory, so innately Russian, that the very masters, who, from
Becker down, were German, did not pretend to understand the system, but
blindly followed the lead of the scholars and their truculent head. And,
to those who hav