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In 1918 the Ukraine was held by German troops and the district east of the Ukraine was in the hands of General Krasnov, the author of a flattering letter to the Kaiser. In the northwest the Germans were at Pskov, Vitebsk and Mohilev. We ourselves were at Murmansk and Archangel. In the east, the front which became known as that of Kolchak, was on the Volga.

Individual philanthropists did their utmost to counterbalance the restrictions on education. Trade schools were opened by the Committee for the Promotion of a Knowledge of Trade and Agriculture among the Jews of Russia, in Minsk, Vilna, and Vitebsk, besides fifteen manual training schools for boys and twenty for girls, in which the indigent pupils are provided with food, clothes, and books.

Protracted investigations failed to substantiate the fabrications of Terentyeva, and in the autumn of 1884 the Supreme Court of the government of Vitebsk rendered the following verdict: To leave the accidental death of the soldier boy to the will of God; to declare all the Jews, against whom the charge of murder has been brought on mere surmises, free from all suspicion; to turn over the soldier woman Terentyeva, for her profligate conduct, to a priest for repentance.

After a day's work as fatiguing for the troops as a long engagement, Napoleon returned to Vitebsk, where he encamped several days, in order to rest his soldiers, and rebuild the store-houses, everywhere overthrown by the Russians, who also destroyed the crops and every kind of forage.

Never can I hear that waltz without the accompaniment of engine wheels grinding rhythmically along speeding tracks. I remained in Vitebsk about six months. I do not believe I was ever homesick during all that time. I was too happy to be homesick. The life suited me extremely well. My life in Polotzk had grown meaner and duller, as the family fortunes declined.

But it is scarcely possible, nor would it be profitable, to enumerate either the places or the persons who were, so to speak, inoculated with the Haskalah virus. In Grodno, Kovno, Lodz, Minsk, Mohilev, Pinsk, Zamoscz, Slutsk, Vitebsk, Zhagory, and other places, they were toiling zealously and diligently, these anchorites in the desert of knowledge.

One time, when I was about eight years old, one of my grown-up cousins went to Vitebsk. Everybody went to see her off, but I didn't. I went with her. I was put on the train, with my best dress tied up in a bandana, and I stayed on the train for hours and hours, and came to Vitebsk. I could not tell, as we rushed along, where the end of Polotzk was.

Why, in Russia lived the Czar, and a great many cruel people; and in Russia were the dreadful prisons from which people never came back. Polotzk and Vitebsk were now bound together by the continuity of the earth, but between them and Russia a formidable barrier still interposed.

Platoff and the Cossacks were hard on his heels; but fighting and marching throughout the weary, bitter day, at night the undaunted marshal found himself in touch with Eugène, who had turned out on the highway from Vitebsk to Orcha to meet him.

How, then, could the Dvina be in Vitebsk? My cousin and I had come on the train, but everybody knew that a train could go everywhere, even to Russia. It became clear to me that the Dvina went on and on, like a railroad track, whereas I had always supposed that it stopped where Polotzk stopped. I had never seen the end of Polotzk; I meant to, when I was bigger.