Page:William Le Queux - The Czar's Spy.djvu/215

 CHAPTER XX

TO AN UNKNOWN BOURNE

ON that grey, dreary northern coast the long winter was fast settling in. Poor oppressed Finland suffers beneath a hard climate with August frosts, an eight months' winter in the north, and five months of frost in the south.

Idling in sleepy Abo, where the public buildings were so mean and meagre, and the houses for the most part built of wood, I saw on every hand the disastrous result of the attempted Russification of the country. The hand of the oppressor, that official sent from Petersburg to crush and to conquer, was upon the honest Finnish nation. The Russian bureaucracy was trying to destroy its weaker but more successful neighbour, and in order to do so employed the harshest and most unscrupulous officials it could import.

My fellow-traveller from Stockholm, who represented a firm of paper-makers in Hamburg, and who paid an annual visit to Abo and Helsingfors, acted as my guide around the town, while I awaited the information from the humbled Chief of Police. My German friend pointed out to me how, since Russia placed her hand upon Finland, progress had been