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bursting over a town like Nijni-Novgorod, so densely crowded
with visitors, and with a commerce so greatly surpassing that of all
other places in Russia. The natives whom business called beyond
the Siberian frontier could not leave the province for a time at least.
The tenor of the first article of the order was express; it admitted
of no exception. All private interests must yield to the public weal.
As to the second article of the proclamation, the order of
expulsion which it contained admitted of no evasion either.
It only concerned foreigners of Asiatic origin, but these could do
nothing but pack up their merchandise and go back the way they came.
As to the mountebanks, of which there were a considerable number,
they had nearly a thousand versts to go before they could reach
the nearest frontier. For them it was simply misery.

At first there rose against this unusual measure a murmur
of protestation, a cry of despair, but this was quickly
suppressed by the presence of the Cossacks and agents of police.
Immediately, what might be called the exodus from the immense
plain began. The awnings in front of the stalls were folded up;
the theaters were taken to pieces; the fires were put out;
the acrobats' ropes were lowered; the old broken-winded
horses of the traveling vans came back from their sheds.
Agents and soldiers with whip or stick stimulated the tardy ones,
and made nothing of pulling down the tents even before the poor
Bohemians had left them.

Under these energetic measures the square of Nijni-Novgorod would,
it was evident, be entirely evacuated before the evening,
and to the tumult of the great fair would succeed the silence
of the desert.

It must again be repeated--for it was a necessary aggravation
of these severe measures--that to all those nomads chiefly concerned
in the order of expulsion even the steppes of Siberia were forbidden,
and they would be obliged to hasten to the south of the Caspian Sea,
either to Persia, Turkey, or the plains of Turkestan. The post
of the Ural, and the mountains which form, as it were, a prolongation
of the river along the Russian frontier, they were not allowed to pass.
They were therefore under the necessity of traveling six hundred
miles before they could tread a free soil.

Just as the reading of the proclamation by the head of the police
came to an end, an idea darted instinctively into the mind
of Michael Strogoff. "What a singular coincidence," thought he,
"between this proclamation expelling all foreigners of Asiatic origin,
and the words exchanged last evening between those two gipsies
of the Zingari race. 'The Father himself sends us where we wish
to go,' that old man said. But 'the Father' is the emperor!
He is never called anything else among the people. How could
those gipsies have foreseen the measure taken against them? how could
they have known it beforehand, and where do they wish to go?
Those are suspicious people, and it seems to me that to them

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