boy for the "little fathers and mothers" of his much-loved team.

It

Such were the experiences of Ruth and Lord Glenant of Russian travel. They found no great difficulty in their journey through Russia. was evident that the Russian Government viewed them as ordinary travellers. They passed the frontier without any difficulty, and reached the frontier town on the other side, where they found the old Count, the Professor, and Bettina, whom the Doctor had succeeded in detaining until the arrival of the travellers.

CHAPTER XXIV.

RUTH'S PLAN OF ESCAPE.

UR narrative now takes us, for the moment, from this frontier town.

where the old Count and his companions had, for so long a time, been concealed. The scene changes to a better sort of Izbathat is, a log-house-in a remote village, but a village of some importance, and a posting station in Russia.

It is always a satisfaction, when, in this strange world, where the positions of men seem to be arranged in a most hap-hazard fashion, the right man happens to be in the right place. Upon such men the destinies, not merely of Earl's families, but of kingdoms, may depend.

The politics of Europe would, humanly speaking, have taken a very different course, and the position and fortunes of each one of us might have been very different from what they are now, if that detestably acute, energetic, and very suspicious individual, Drouet, had not been the postmaster at St. Menehould, when Louis the Sixteenth, Marie Antoinette, and their ill-fated family were taking that most ill-arranged flight, hindered by so many accidents and by so many follies, from Paris to the Marquis de Bouilli's head-quarters at Metz.

Across the woven tapestry of each man's life and fortunes there come threads from no friendly, no well-known, and no pre-imagined shuttle; and it is such threads which often determine the pattern, and direct the story, embodied in the tapestry.

In this Russian village, which for many reasons I will not name, there dwelt a man, rejoicing in the humble name of Boris Bauer. The name will show that he was partly of Russian, and partly of German origin. This man was in the employ of

Government in what capacity I do not exactly know; but I do know that, in whatever capacity he served, he joined to his official functions those of a spy. Those, too, of a trusted spy: for he had already distinguished himself in that capacity, though only locally. His reports were not in general addressed to the authorities at St. Petersburg, but to the Governor of his province, whose seat of government was in a town about eight and twenty versts distant from the large village which Boris Bauer honoured by his surveillance. A man of his intelligence (he was a born spy, and must in his earliest years have been hateful to his schoolfellows) would never have been placed in that obscure village, and certainly would not have been retained there, if it had not been the first important village and posting station on the high road from Moscow, to be met with between the frontier guardhouse of Russia and Count Maremma's country.

Boris Bauer pined for an opportunity to distinguish himself still further than he had done, and thus to obtain the high distinction he had so

long coveted of being transferred to the capital, and connected with the secret police of St. Petersburg. He had read of Fouché; and his ambition burned within him, not to become a Napoleon-he thought little of Napoleons, and their rough ways of rising into eminence;— but to become the first minister of police of any despotic sovereign. It is sad to think of so much genius and so much ambition being buried in an obscure frontier village of Russia.

It is almost needless to say how such a man regarded passports. He looked at them with the ardent eye of a discoverer looking at his charts, which, if interpreted by the eye of genius, might lead to the lands of Ophir, and the territory of Prester John.

We must now leave Boris Bauer, and revert to the proceedings of Lord Glenant and Ruth Sumner on their journey. It was well, as I intimated before, that they were members of a family who were too great to pay the usual respect to the proprieties. Otherwise their journeying together would never have been permitted.