“I am about to be sent from this life. You may kill me—you may kill me over and over again as you already have done. You may subject me to the most terrible penalties—but you can add nothing to what I have already endured. I do not fear death. You may, now, kill my body, but you cannot destroy my belief that the time of the people’s happiness and freedom is surely coming, a time when the life of the people will express itself in forms in which truth and justice will be realized—when the ideas of brotherhood and freedom will be no more empty sounds, but part of our every-day, real life. If this is truth it is no grief to lay down one’s life—
“I have finished.”
A few days later the following letter was received from her by some friends in Tamboff, smuggled out through a chain of civil criminals:
My Dear Comrades:
Turn over my money partly to Jennie, the balance, the greatest, turn over to T. I often pass sleepless nights, but I feel courageously and I know how to save my energy, which has accumulated owing to idleness.
I dream of the time to hand. My wish is growing stronger and I fear that I will commit suicide if the autocracy will show me clemency. My death appears to me of such a value to my people that I will receive any act of clemency from the Czar as an act of revenge and insult.
If it will be possible and if they will not kill me soon, I will try to be useful by gathering new followers.
I would like to know how things are in Tamboff. Have you sufficient books for the peasants now in prison? Do your duty. It is important that they should leave prison as revolutionists or near that.
I embrace all my old comrades and shake the hands of the new ones.
Send me your postals with your handwriting. They will be dear to me.