in Kiev on the 11th of February, 1879, while attending one of the meetings of a secret revolutionary society. They were surprised by the police late in the evening, and the men of the party resisted arrest, drawing revolvers and firing at the police and the gendarmes. A sharp skirmish followed, in the course of which one gendarme and two of the revolutionists were shot dead and several on each side wounded. The whole party was finally captured and thrown into prison. For being present at the time of this armed resistance to the police, although she had not participated in it, and for belonging to the revolutionary party, Miss Armfeldt was sentenced to four

teen years and ten months of penal servitude, with deprivation of all civil rights and exile to Siberia for life. At the time of our visit to Kara she had finished her term of probation in prison, and was living outside in the free command with

her mother, a lady sixty or sixty-five years of age, who had voluntarily come to Siberia to share her daughter's fate.

The sun had set and it was fast growing dark when I reached the little whitewashed cabin which, from the descriptions I had had of it, I thought must be the Armfeldts'. I

and that her sister, who was a tolerably well-known writer on scientific subjects, was married to the Russian explorer Fedchenko, who perished recently on a mountain in Switzerland. Personally, Nathalie Armfeldt was not one of the striking personalities, such as Perofskaya (Per-off'ska-ya), Bardina (Bar' dee-na), and others. She belonged to that modest set of workers in whom the beautiful moral qualities

consisted of a square pine table without a cloth, three unpainted pine chairs, and a narrow single bedstead covered with a coarse gray blanket. On each side of the door were shelves, upon which were a few domestic vessels and utensils, such as plates, cups and saucers, knives and forks, and a tea

of the Russian revolutionist are shown at their bestabsolute devotion and absolute unselfishness. These simple virtues become great, both as qualities and as moving powers, when they are so elevated as to be almost perfectly pure. You have probably seen many of these types among the Siberian exiles. The touching sympathy that permeates what you write about them is a proof of this."

pot. The room contained absolutely nothing else except a basket and a cheap Russian trunk under the bed. Everything was scrupulously neat and clean, but in other respects the house looked like the home of some wretchedly poor Irish laborer. I removed my heavy overcoat and was about to hand Miss Armfeldt the letter that I had for her, when she caught me suddenly by the arm and said, "Stop! Don't do that! Wait until I put up the window shutters and bar the door." She lighted a candle with trembling hands, and then ran out and closed the windows with tight board shutters, barred the door, and returning said, "You are not accustomed to the atmosphere of alarm and apprehension in which we live. You might have been seen through the window giving me a letter." She then took the letter; but without opening it fixed her eyes upon me with the expression of bewildered, half-incredulous amazement that

had not left her face since I introduced myself at the door. Finally she said, "How did you ever get here?"

I replied that I had come on horseback over the mountains from Stretinsk (Stray'tinsk). "But how were you ever allowed to come here ?"

"I was not allowed," I replied. "I came here without anybody's knowledge. I have been in Kara almost a week, and this is the first opportunity I have had to get out of doors unwatched."

I then told her that I had come to Siberia to investigate the life of the political convicts, and gave her a brief account of my previous Siberian experience. She looked at me like one half dazed by the shock of some great and sudden surprise. Finally she said, speaking for the first time in English: "Excuse me for staring at you so, and pardon me if I have not seemed to welcome you cordially; but I

MADAM SUKHOMLINA, A MEMBER OF THE FREE COMMAND.

can hardly believe that I am awake. I am so excited and astonished that I don't know what I am doing or saying. You are the first foreigner that I have seen since my exile, and your sudden appearance here, and in my house, is such an extraordinary event in my life that it has completely overwhelmed me. I feel as Livingstone must have felt when Stanley found him in Central Africa. How did the remarkable idea of coming to Siberia and investigating the life of the political convicts ever enter your head?"

I was answering her questions in English, when I heard a feeble and broken voice, which seemed to come from behind the oven, inquiring, in Russian, "Who is there, Nathalie? With whom are you talking?"

"It is an American traveler, mother, who has found us even here at the mines."

The feeble voice was that of Miss Armfeldt's mother, who had been asleep on a cot bed behind a low partition that partly screened the oven and who had been awakened by our conversation. In a moment she came out to greet

pathy and pity merely to look at her. I had never seen so sad, hopeless, grief-stricken a face.

I spent half an hour with the Armfeldts and then left them, promising to return at a later hour in the evening, when Miss Armfeldt said she would have the other members of the free command there to meet me. Flushed with nervous excitement, I hurried back to Major Potulof's house, where I found dinner waiting for me. Every now and then in the course of the meal Mrs. Potulof would look at me with a curious expression in her face, as if she wondered what I had been doing all the afternoon; but apparently she could not summon up resolution enough to ask me, and it did not become necessary, therefore, for the recording angel to drop any more tears upon my already blotted record.

At 7 o'clock I went back to the Armfeldts', where I found a political convict named Kurteyef (Koor-tay'eff) and a pale, delicate young woman, who was introduced to me as Madam Kolenkina (Ko-len'kinah). I recognized the latter by name as one of the revolutionists sent to the mines for alleged complicity in the plot to assassinate General Mezzentsef (Mez'zentseff), the St. Petersburg chief of police, but I was surprised to find her so young, delicate, and harmless-looking a woman. I had been surprised, however, in the same way many times before. The women who have taken an active part in some of the most terrible tragedies of the past fifteen years in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev, and Odessa, who have shown a power of endurance and a stern inflexibility of character rarely found in men, are delicate girls from eighteen to twenty-five years of age, whom I should have taken for teachers in a Sunday-school or rather timid pupils in a female seminary.

One by one the political convicts of the free command began to assemble at Miss Armfeldt's house. Every few minutes a low signal-knock would be heard at one of the window-shutters and Miss Armfeldt would go cautiously to the door, inquire who was there, and when satisfied that it was one of her companions would take down the bar and give him admission. The small, dimly lighted cabin, the strained hush of anxiety and apprehension, the soft, mysterious knocking at the windowshutters, the low but eager conversation, and the group of pale-faced men and women who crowded about me with intense, wondering interest as if I were a man that had just risen from the dead, made me feel like one talking and acting in a strange, vivid dream. There was not, in the whole environment, a single