pital records do not, by any means, represent the whole aggregate of sickness in the Kara penal settlements. Many convicts of the free command lie ill in their own little huts or cabins, and even in the prison kameras there are scores of sick whose cases are not regarded as serious enough to necessitate their removal to a hospital that is perhaps overcrowded already. A convict in the early stages of scurvy may therefore lie in a prison kamera for a week or two, poisoning with his foul, diseased breath the air that must be breathed by men who are still comparatively well.

After visiting all the kameras in the men's prison, we came out at last into the pure, cold, delicious air, crossed the court-yard, went through another gate in the stockade, and entered the women's prison—a similar but smaller log building, which contained two large cells opening into each other. These rooms were well warmed and lighted, were higher than the cells in the men's prison, and had more than twice as much air space per capita; but their sanitary condition was little, if any, better. The air in them had perhaps been less vitiated by repeated respiration, but it was so saturated with foul odors from a neglected water-closet that one's senses could barely tolerate it. The floor was uneven and decayed, and in places the rotten planks had either settled or given way entirely, leaving dark holes into a vacant space between the floor and the swampy ground. Into these holes the women were evidently in the habit of throwing slops and garbage. I went and stood for a moment over one of them, but I could see nothing in the darkness beneath; and the damp air, laden with the effluvium of decaying organic matter that was rising from it, seemed to me so suggestive of typhoid fever and diphtheria that I did not venture to take a second breath in that vicinity. The kameras in the women's prison had no furniture of any kind except the plank sleeping-platforms, which, of course, were entirely destitute of bedding. I did not see in either room a single pillow or blanket. In these two cells were imprisoned 48 girls and women, 6 or 7 of whom were carrying in their arms pallid, sickly-looking babies.

At every step in our walk through the two prisons Major Potulof was besieged by unfortunate convicts who had complaints to make or petitions to present. One man had changed names with a comrade on the road while intoxicated, and had thus become a hard-labor convict when he should have been merely a forced colonist, and he wanted his case investigated. Another insisted that he had long since served out his full prison term and should be enrolled in the free command. Three more

declared that they had been two months in prison and were still ignorant of the nature of the charges made against them. Many of the convicts addressed themselves eagerly to me, under the impression, apparently, that I must be an inspector or "reviser" sent to Kara to investigate the prison management. In order to save Major Potulof from embarrassment and the complainants from possible punishment, I hastened to assure them that we had no power to redress grievances or to grant relief; that we were merely travelers visiting Kara out of curiosity. The complaints, and the manifestly bad condition of the prisons, seemed to irritate Major Potulof, and he grew more and more silent, moody, and morose as we went through the kameras. He did not attempt to explain, defend, or excuse anything, nor did he then, or at any subsequent time, ask me what impression the Ust Kara prisons made upon me. He knew very well what impression they must make.

In another stockaded yard, adjoining the one through which we had passed, stood the political prison for women; but Major Potulof could not take us into it without the permission of the gendarme commandant, Captain Nikolin. From all that I subsequently learned with regard to this place of punishment, I have little doubt that, while it is cleaner and less overcrowded than the common-criminal prisons, it does not rank much above the latter in comfort or in sanitary condition.

Early Tuesday afternoon we visited the Middle Kara prison, which was perhaps the best one we inspected at the mines. It was distant from the Lower Diggings about three miles, and was reached by a road that ran up the right bank of the Kara River through a desolate, snowy valley, dotted here and there with the dilapidated huts and cabins of the free command. More wretched and cheerless places of abode than these can hardly be imagined. Readers who remember the so-called "shanties on the rocks" in the upper part of New York City can form, perhaps, with the aid of the illustration on page 172, some faint idea of their appearance. The best of them could hardly bear comparison with the poorest of the Irish laborers' houses that stand, here and there, along our railroads, while the worst of them were mere dog kennels of driftwood and planks, in which it was almost incredible that human beings could exist throughout a Siberian winter.

The ostensible object of organizing a free command in connection with the Kara prisons was to encourage reformation among the convicts by holding out to them, as a reward for good behavior, the hope of obtaining release from confinement and an opportunity to better their condition. It does not seem to me, how

please have me locked up.' 'Locked up!' said I. 'What for? What have you been doing?' 'I haven't been doing anything,' he replied, 'but you know I am a brodyag. I have run away many times, and if I am not locked up I shall run away again. I am old and grayheaded now, I can't stand life in the woods as I could once, and I don't want to run away; but if I hear General Kukushka calling me I must go. Please do me the favor to lock me up, your High Nobility, so that I can't go.' I did lock him up," continued the officer, "and kept him in prison most of the summer. When he was released the fever of unrest had left him, and he was as quiet, contented, and docile as ever."

There seems to me something pathetic in this inability of the worn, broken old convict to hear the cry of the cuckoo without yielding to the enticement of the wild, free, adventurous life with which that cry had become associated. He knew that he was feeble and broken; he knew that he could no longer tramp through the forests, swim rapid rivers, subsist upon roots, and sleep on the ground, as he once had done; but when the cuckoo called he felt again the impulses of his youth, he lived again in imagination the life of independence and freedom that he had known only in the pathless woods, and he was dimly conscious that if not prevented by force he "must go." As Ulysses had himself bound in order that he might not yield to the voices of the sirens, so the poor old convict had himself committed to prison in order that he might not hear and obey the cry of the cuckoo, which was so intimately associated with all that he had ever known of happiness and freedom.

It may seem to the reader strange that convicts are able to escape from penal settlements garrisoned and guarded by a force of a thousand Cossacks, but when one knows all the circumstances this ceases to be a matter for surprise. The houses of the ticket-of-leave convicts in the free command are not watched; there is no cordon of soldiers around the penal settlements; and it is comparatively an easy matter for a convict who is not under personal restraint to put into a gray bag a small quantity of food saved from his daily ration, tie a kettle to his belt, take an ax in his hand, and steal away at night into the trackless forest. It is a well-known fact, moreover, that many prison officials wink at escapes because they are able to turn them to pecuniary account. This they do by failing to report the runaways as "absent," by continuing to draw for weeks or months the clothing and the rations to which such runaways would be entitled if present, and by selling to the local representatives of Jewish speculators the food and garments thus acVOL. XXXVIII.—24-25.

quired. Not infrequently these speculators have contracts to furnish prison supplies, and they fill them by reselling to the Government at a high price the very same flour and clothing that have just been stolen from it by its own officials. To an unscrupulous prison warden every dead or runaway convict is a source of steady revenue so long as his death or flight can be concealed and his name carried on the prison rolls. Under such circumstances, energetic measures to prevent the escape of criminals or to secure their recapture could hardly be expected.

The prison of Middle Kara, which is situated in the penal settlement of the same name, is a one-story log building of medium size, placed in such a way that one of its longer sides stands flush with the line of the street, while the other is inclosed by a high stockade so as to form a nearly square yard. It did not seem to me to differ much in appearance or plan from the prison at Ust Kara; but it was in better sanitary condition than the latter, and was evidently of more recent construction. As nearly all its complement of prisoners were at work in the upper gold placer when we arrived, I could not determine by inspection whether or not it would be overcrowded at night. Major Potulof told me, in reply to a question, that the number of criminals confined in it was 107. At the time of our visit, however, its kameras contained only a few men, who had been excused from hard labor on account of temporary disability, or who had been assigned to domestic work such as sweeping or cooking. The atmosphere of the kameras was heavy and lifeless, but it seemed to be infinitely better than the air in the Ust Kara prison, and I could breathe it without much repugnance. By fastening against the walls over the sleeping-platforms large fresh boughs of hemlock and pine, an attempt had apparently been made to disguise the peculiar odor that is characteristic of Siberian prisons. Between these boughs, in some of the kameras, I noticed, tacked against the logs, rectangular cards about twenty inches long by twelve inches wide, bearing, in large printed letters, verses from the New Testament. The only ones that I can now remember were: "Him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out," and "Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." Whence these scriptural cards came I do not know, but there seemed to me to be a strange and almost ghastly incongruity between the dark, grimy prison walls and the festal decorations of aromatic evergreens — between the rough plank sleeping-benches infested with vermin, and the promise of rest for the weary and heavy laden. How great a boon even bodily rest would be to the hard