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Rh to come because his wife was ill. As it happened to be the day that all of the political exiles were required to sign their names in the police register, Dr. Martínof had gone to the isprávnik, explained his wife's condition, said that she was unable to go out, and asked that she be excused. The isprávnik made a coarse remark about her, which must have been hard for a husband to bear, but which Dr. Martínof dared not resent, and said that if the woman was not able to walk of course she could not come to the police-station. This was Friday afternoon, and it was on the evening of that day that Dr. Martínof sent word to me not to come to his house on account of his wife's illness. It turned out, however, that her suffering was not decisive, and early the next morning, by her husband's advice, she took a walk of a few moments back and forth in front of the house. The isprávnik happened to drive past, and saw her. He went at once to the police-station, and from there sent an officer to her with a curt note, in which he said that if she was able to walk out she was able to come to the police-station, and that if she did not make her appearance within a certain short specified time, he should be compelled to treat her "with all the rigor of the law." The poor woman, therefore, had to choose between the risk, on the one hand, of having her child born at the police-station in the presence of the isprávnik and his green-eyed assistant, and the certainty, on the other, of having it born in one of the cells of the Minusínsk prison. If her husband should attempt to defend her, or to resist the officers sent to take her into custody, he would simply be knocked down and thrown into a solitary-confinement cell, and then, perhaps, be separated from her altogether by a sentence of banishment to the arctic region of Yakútsk on the general and elastic charge of "resisting the authorities." The stupid brutality of the isprávnik's action in this case was made the more conspicuous by the circumstance that Mrs. Martínof's term of exile would expire by limitation in about two weeks,