never been a case of small-pox in the station, we brought in our baggage, drank tea, and, without removing our clothing, lay down as usual on our sheepskin overcoats upon the floor of the travelers' room. Monday morning, refreshed by a good night's sleep and a breakfast of tea, fresh bread, and fat soup, we resumed our journey and rode all day through shallow valleys, between low, treeless, and dreary-looking mountains, towards the Alexandrofski Zavod. The sky was clear and the sunshine inspiriting; but the mercury had fallen to fifteen degrees below zero, our horses were white and shaggy with frost, the jolting of our vehicle made it difficult to keep our furs wrapped closely about us, and we suffered severely all day from cold. About half-past six o'clock in the evening we stopped for an hour to drink tea in a village whose name, Kavwikuchigazamurskaya (Kah-vwee/koochee-gaz-ah-moor'skah-yah), seemed to me to contain more letters than the place itself had inhabitants. We met there a young technologist from St. Petersburg, who had been sent to the mines to teach the convicts the use of dynamite, and who was on his way home. He gave us a most gloomy account of life in the silver-mining district. The convict prisons, he said, were "the very worst in the Empire"; the officials were "cruel and incompetent"; the convicts were "ill-treated, beaten by everybody, with or without reason, forced to work when sick, and killed outright with explosives which the overseers were too ignorant or too careless to handle with proper precautions." He referred to the mining authorities with bitterness, as if his personal relations with them had been unpleasant; and, in view of that fact, it seemed to me prudent to take his statements with some allowance. I give them for what they may be worth in connection with my own later investigations. Just before midnight on Tuesday we reached the village of Makarovo (Mah-kah'ro-vo), 112 miles from Stretinsk, and stopped for the night in what was known as the "zemski kvartir" (zem'skee kvar-teer'), a log-house occupied by a peasant family whose duty it was to give food and shelter to traveling officials. As soon as possible after drinking tea we went to bed, Mr. Frost lying on the floor, while I stretched myself out on a bench near one of the windows. The room was intolerably hot, the pine logs of the walls in the vicinity of the oven emitted a strong resinous odor, the air was close and heavy, and for a long time I could not get to sleep. I had just lost consciousness, as it seemed to me, when I was aroused by a loud and prolonged "Cocka-doo-oo-dle-doo-oo!" which which proceeded, apparently, from a point distant only a few inches from my head. Upon investigating this singular phenomenon I discovered that the space under the bench upon which I lay had been inclosed with slats and turned into a chicken-coop. A large cock, thinking, doubtless, that it must be near morning, had put his head out and up through the slats, and crowed lustily in my very ear. This performance he repeated, at short intervals, throughout the remainder of the night, so that, although I finally took a position as far away from him as possible on the floor, I could get little rest. I have slept in Siberian cabins with colts, dogs, cattle, and sheep, but one wakeful Shanghai rooster will make more disturbance in a small room at night than a whole ark-load of quadrupeds. We reached the Alexandrofski Zavod at ten o'clock Tuesday morning and found it to be a dreary, dead-and-alive Siberian village of two or three hundred inhabitants, situated in the middle of a flat, uncultivated steppe, with a rickety, tumble-down bridge in the foreground, and low, bare, snow-covered mountains in the distance. The convict prison, to which we were conducted by the warden, Mr. Fomin, proved to be nothing more than a "bogadielnia" (bo-gah-dyel'nya), or infirmary, to which were sent hopelessly disabled and broken-down convicts from other parts of the Nerchinsk mining district. The main building, which is shown on the right of the bridge in the illustration on this page, is a one-story log structure of the usual Kara type, and contained, at the time of our visit, 137 prisoners. It had been standing, the warden said, about half a century, and its sanitary condition, as might have been expected, was bad. The floors were dirty, the air in the cells was heavy and vitiated, and the corridors were filled with the stench of privies and neglected parashas. In two of the kameras (kah'mer-ahs) we found lunatics living with their sane comrades. The hospital attached to the prison is small, but it was not overcrowded, and it seemed to me to be clean and in fairly good condition. The coarse linen on the cot beds was dirty, but the feldsher, or hospital-steward, said that this was not his fault. The supply of bed-linen was scanty, and he did the best he could with what was furnished him. He seemed to be very much gratified when I told him that his hospital, although small, impressed me as being the cleanest and best-managed institution of the kind that I had seen in the Trans-Baikal. After having inspected the prison, Mr. Frost and I returned to Mr. Fomin's comfortable existing state of affairs he referred to two gold placers in his district, which had been carefully examined by engineers of the Tsar's cabinet1 and had been pronounced worthless. They had subsequently been sold or granted by the Tsar to private individuals, and had then produced 600 puds (poods), or more than 27,000 pounds of pure gold. The ispravnik intimated, although he did not explicitly say, that the Government engineers who examined the placers and declared them worthless were in league with the private individuals who desired to obtain title to them; and that the proceeds of this robbery of the Crown were shared by house, where we met the ispravnik of Nerchinski Zavod, a tall, well-built, good-looking man about forty years of age, who was making a tour of his district. He was very pleasant and communicative, talked with us frankly about the Nerchinsk mines, and said, without hesitation, that the Government's management of them was "clumsy, incompetent, and wasteful." He thought that it would be much better for the country if the whole Nerchinsk silver-mining district were thrown open to private enterprise. Many of the engineers in the employ of the Government were either corrupt or incapable, and the mines did not produce half as much silver as they ought. As an illustration of the 1 Nearly all the mines in this part of the TransBaikal belong to the Tsar in person and are known as the "cabinet mines." How the Tsar acquired title to them I do not know. An educated Russian gentleman the parties to the corrupt agreement. I have no doubt that such was the case. The Tsar himself is constantly robbed and defrauded by the officials to whom he intrusts the management of his Siberian property. After a good dinner of soup, fish, roasted grouse, vegetables, and compote of fruits, with vodka and two or three kinds of wine, which Mr. Fomin set out in honor of his guests, the ispravnik, the warden, Mr. Frost, and I started with two troikas of horses for the mine of Akatui, which was distant about twelve miles. This mine had long before been abandoned by the Government and had filled with water; but I was particularly anxious to see how it of my acquaintance began the compilation of a work that he intended to publish abroad under the title, "The Origin of the Wealth of the Romanofs," but he was sent to Siberia before he could complete his investigation. was situated, partly because it had once been of a peculiar, half-ruined log building, which the most dreaded place of punishment in all Siberia, and partly because the Government was then making preparations to transport to it all of the political convicts at the mines of Kara. The road ran across the desolate steppe to the foot of a low mountain range six or eight miles north-west of the Zavod, and then entered a shallow valley between rounded and perfectly barren hills, about a thousand feet in height, whose snowy slopes limited the vision in every direction. As we ascended this valley the hills shut it in more and more closely, had once apparently been covered with stucco or plaster, and through the middle of which ran a high-arched gateway. On the flanks of this structure, and forty or fifty yards from it, stood two weather-beaten prisons of stuccoed brick, one of them roofless, and both gradually falling into ruins. It was evident that these prisons had once been surrounded by a stockade, and that the log building with the arched gateway was the corps-de-garde through which admission was had to the inclosure. The stockade, however, had long 1. THE VALLEY AND MINING SETTLEMENT OF ALGACHI. 2. THE PRISON AT ALGACHI. 3. THE PRISON CORRIDOR. until, a mile and a half or two miles beyond the small village of Akatui, it became a secluded and inexpressibly dreary glen, where there were no signs of life except the stunted and leafless bushes which here and there broke the uniform whiteness of the snow-covered hills. It seemed to me that I had never seen a place so lonely, so cheerless, so isolated from all the living world. It might have been a valley among the arctic hills of Greenland near the Pole. "Here is the old political prison," said the ispravnik; and as he spoke we stopped in front before disappeared, the iron gratings had been removed from the windows, and little remained to indicate to a careless observer the real nature of the ruins or the purposes that they had served. I alighted from my telega and entered the prison on the right of the corpsde-garde, thinking that I might discover a mural inscription left by some lonely and unhappy prisoner, or perhaps find one of the iron rings or staples in the wall to which refractory convicts were chained. Every scrap of iron, however, that could be used elsewhere had been stripped from the building; the floors had rotted away; the plaster had fallen; and nothing whatever remained to suggest to one's imagination the unwritten history of the gloomy prison, or bear witness to the cruelties and tragedies that had given to Akatui its evil fame. The prison on the left of the corps-degarde was in a much better state of repair than the other, and would doubtless have repaid a careful examination; but its windows were fastened, its heavy plank doors were secured with padlocks, and the warden said he did not know where the keys were or how we could gain admission. The entrance to the mine of Akatui was on the hillside, five or six hundred feet above the bottom of the valley, and we could just see, in the deepening twilight, the outlines of a small tool-house that stood near the mouth of the shaft. At an earlier hour of the day I should have proposed to visit it; but the darkness of night was already gathering in the valley, the air was bitterly cold, and as the ispravnik and the warden seemed anxious to return to the Zavod I was obliged to content myself with such an examination of Akatui as could be made in the vicinity of the prisons. Lunin (Loon'in), one of the Decembrist conspirators of 1825, lived and died in penal servitude at this mine, and somewhere in the neighborhood lie buried many of the Polish patriots sent to Akatui after the insurrection of 1863. I was unable, however, to find their graves. The Russian Government does not take pains to perpetuate the memory of the political offenders whom it tortures to death in its Siberian prisons, and over the moldering bodies of most of them there is not so much as a mound. Since my return from Siberia a new prison has been erected in the dreary valley of Akatui, and to it are to be transported all of the political convicts from Kara. The intention of the Government is to pump the water out of the abandoned mine and set the politicals at work in its damp and gloomy galleries. The change, of course, will be for the worse. If there is in Siberia a more lonely, a more cheerless, a more God-forsaken place than Kara, it is the snowy, secluded valley of Akatui. At a late hour Tuesday night we returned to the Alexandrofski Zavod, and about noon on Wednesday, after a refreshing night's sleep and a good breakfast, we set out for the mine of Algachi, distant about twenty-two miles. There was little, if any, change in the appearance of the country as we made our way slowly into the silver-mining district. One range of low, barren, round-topped mountains succeeded another, like great ocean swells, with hardly a sign of life or vegetation, except in the shallow haystack-dotted valleys. From the summit of the last divide that we crossed beVOL. XXXVIII.-106. fore reaching Algachi, the country, which we could see for thirty miles, looked like a boundless ocean suddenly frozen solid in the midst of a tremendous Cape Horn gale when the seas were running high. Far down in a snowy trough between two of these mighty surges we could just make out a little cluster of unpainted loghouses, which our driver said was the mining village of Algachi. I wondered, as we stopped for a moment on the summit to look at it, whether in all the world one could find a settlement situated in a more dreary and desolate spot. As far as the eye could see there was not a tree, nor a dark object of any kind, to break the ghastly whiteness of the rolling ocean of snowy mountains; and it was not hard to imagine that the village itself was nothing more than a little collection of floating driftwood, caught in the trough of the sea at the moment when the tremendous billows were suddenly turned to snow and ice. We descended the steep slope of the mountain to the village by a stony, zigzag road, entered a long, dirty, strawlittered street between two rows of unpainted wooden houses, passed through several herds of cattle that sheepskin-coated boys were driving in from pasture, and finally stopped, amid a crowd of curious idlers, in front of the "zemski kvartir," or official lodging-house, where we intended to spend the night. It was already five o'clock,-too late for a visit to the prison or an inspection of the mine,—and as soon as we had brought in our baggage and explained to the people of the house who we were, we set about the preparation of supper. Our resources were rather limited, but our peasant hostess furnished a steaming samovar with a little milk and butter, Mr. Frost produced, with triumph, a can of Californian preserved peaches, which he said he had bought in Stretinsk "for a holiday," and we thawed out and toasted on a stick, before a cheerful open fire, some of our frozen, sand-powdered bread. Altogether we made out so good a supper that Mr. Frost's imagination never once suggested to him the desirability of milk-toast, and we went to bed on the floor about nine o'clockwarm, comfortable, and happy. Wednesday morning, after breakfast, we called upon Mr. Nesterof (Nes'ter-off), the resident mining engineer, and Lieutenant-Colonel Saltstein, the warden of the prison, for the purpose of getting permission to examine and investigate. Mr. Nesterof received us with generous Russian hospitality, insisted upon our taking a supplementary breakfast with him, and filled and refilled our glasses with vodka, cordial, Crimean wine, and Boston canned lemonade, until we feared that we should have to postpone our investigations indefinitely. Lieutenant-Colonel Saltstein, who lived in a |