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BY ORDER OF THE CZAR. 367

the police, was of a minor character presenting under their investigation none of those grave and serious features which really belonged to it, and like many another revolu- tionary enterprise in. Russia, it was nipped in the bud without exciting any particular attention. It formed, how- ever, during several weeks an interesting political subject in the hands of an English correspondent attached to a great London journal, and it was through this medium that Lady Forsyth and Dick Chetwynd became acquainted with the unhappy position of the Countess Stravensky's companion.

The newspaper correspondent informed the English public that among the prisoners recently tried and con- demned to a period of exile in Siberia, was a young Englishman who, having first given an assumed name to his captors, had confessed that he was Philip Forsyth, an artist, of London, a student at the Royal Academy, the son of an eminent engineer, who had lived and died in Russia, leaving behind a son, Philip, and his mother, Lady Forsyth, a widow, of London. The young fellow, said the correspondent, had no doubt given these particulars in the hope of some intervention on the part of his family. The plot with which he was associated was not regarded as of any very great importance by the authorities, except that it compelled them to make an example of the persons concerned, one of whom, an Italian Jew, named Ferrari, having strangled his sister, had succeeded in committing suicide in prison ; another, Ivan Kostanzhoglo, was sen- tenced to lifelong imprisonment ; a third, Paul Petroski, to a short period of detention ; and a fourth, a remarka- bly handsome woman* who having, as in the case of the English artist, given at the outset a false name, had con- fessed under pressure that she was Anna Klosstock, and that the object of her association with Ferrari and the rest of the confederacy lay chiefly in the hope that she might