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large, comfortable house full of blossoming oleanders, geraniums, and abutilon, then declared that we must drink another bottle of wine and eat a third breakfast with him, and it was after one o'clock when we finally set out for the prison and the mine.

Lieutenant-Colonel Saltstein was a Finn by birth and spoke Russian badly and with a strong German accent, but he seemed to be honest and trustworthy, and talked to me with great frankness and good-humor.

"I am afraid," he said, as we drove through the village street, "that you will find our prison the worst you have ever seen. It is very old and in bad condition, but I can't do much to improve it. We are too far away from Peter" (St. Petersburg).

I replied reassuringly that I did not think it could be worse than the common-criminal prison at Ust Kara (Oost Kah-rah'), and said that I had had experience enough to understand some of the difficulties in the way of prison reform. He said nothing, but shook his head doubtfully, as if he thought that my experience would not be complete until I had examined the prison at Algachi. We presently stopped in front of a high log stockade, and, alighting from our vehicle, were received by a sentry with presented arms, and then admitted by the officer of the day to a spacious courtyard, in the middle of which stood the prison. It was a long, low, quadrangular building of squared logs, with a plain board roof, a small porch and a door at one end, and a long row of heavily grated windows. It seemed to me at first sight to be falling down. The wall on the side next to us had sunk into the ground until it was apparently two feet or more out of plumb, and, so far as I could see, nothing prevented it from giving way altogether except a row of logs braced against it at nearly a right angle on the side towards which it leaned. All of the walls, at some remote time in the past, had been covered with plaster or stucco and then whitewashed; but this superficial coating had fallen off here and there in patches, giving to the building a most dilapidated appearance. It was, manifestly, a very old prison; but exactly how old, LieutenantColonel Saltstein could not tell me. For aught that he knew to the contrary it might have been standing since the opening of the mine in 1817. We entered the door at one end of the building and found ourselves in a long, dark, foul-smelling corridor, which was lighted only at the ends, and which divided the prison longitudinally into halves. Immediately to the left of the door as we entered was the pharmacy, and next to it a large square kamera used as a hospital or lazaret. In the latter were eight or ten low beds, upon which, under dirty,

and in some cases bloody, sheets, were lying eight or ten sick or wounded convicts, whose faces were whiter, more emaciated, and more ghastly than any I had yet seen. Two or three of them, the warden said, had just been torn and shattered by a premature explosion of dynamite in the mine. The atmosphere of the lazaret, polluted by over-respiration, heavy with the fevered breath of the sick, and pervaded by a faint odor of liniment and drugs, was so insufferable that I was glad, after a quick glance about the room, to escape into the corridor. The first regular kamera that we examined was about twenty-two feet square and seven or eight feet high, with two windows, a large brick oven, and a plank sleeping-platform extending around three of its sides. There was no provision for ventilation, and the air was almost, if not quite, as bad as in the worst cells of the prisons at Ust Kara. I could breathe enough of it to sustain life, and that was all. The first thing that particularly attracted my attention, after I entered the kamera, was a broad band of dull red which extended around the dingy, whitewashed walls, just above the sleeping-platform, like a spotty dado of iron rust. Noticing that I was looking at it with curiosity, Lieutenant-Colonel Saltstein remarked, with a half-humorous, half-cynical smile, that the prisoners had been "trying to paint their walls red."

"What is it, any way?" I inquired, and stepping to one end of the sleeping-platform I made a closer examination. The dull red band at once resolved itself into a multitude of contiguous or overlapping blood-stains, with here and there the dried and flattened body of a bed-bug sticking to the whitewash. I had no further difficulty in guessing the nature and significance of the discoloration. The tortured and sleepless prisoners had been "trying to paint their walls red" by crushing bed-bugs with their hands, as high up as they could reach while lying on the nares, and in this way had so stained the dingy whitewash with their own blood that at a little distance there seemed to be a dado of iron rust around the three sides of the kamera where they slept. How many years this had been going on, how many thousand convicts had helped to "paint" those "walls red," I do not know; but I had suffered enough in Siberia myself from vermin fully to understand and appreciate the significance of that dull red band.

It is unnecessary to describe in detail the other kameras of this wretched prison. They were all precisely like the first one except that they differed slightly in dimensions. All were overcrowded, all were swarming with vermin, and the air in them was polluted almost beyond endurance. At the time of our visit the prison

as a whole contained 169 convicts-about our superiors and send them to St. Petersburg twice the number for which there was adequate air space.

At the first favorable opportunity I said to Lieutenant-Colonel Saltstein: "I cannot understand why you allow such a prison as this to exist. You have here 169 convicts. Only forty or fifty of them work in the mine; the rest lie all day in these foul cells in idleness. Why don't you take them out to the nearest forest, set them at work cutting timber, make them drag the logs to the village, and have them build a better and larger prison for themselves? They would be glad to do it, the expense would be trifling, and in a few months you would have here a prison fit for a human being to live in."

"My dear sir,” he replied,1 "I cannot send convicts into the woods without orders to do so. Suppose some of them should escape, as they probably would,— I should be held responsible and should lose my place. I don't dare do anything that I have not been ordered to do by the Prison Department. The authorities in St. Petersburg are aware of the condition of this prison. I have reported on it year after year. As much as five years ago, after calling attention as urgently as I dared to the state of affairs, I received orders to consult with the district architect and draw up a plan and estimates for a new prison. I did so; but you know how such things go. Letters are two or three months in reaching St. Petersburg from here. When our plans and estimates finally get there they go to the Prison Department, where they have to take their turn with hundreds of other documents from hundreds of other prisons in all parts of the Empire. Perhaps for months they are not even looked at. Finally they are examined, and some decision is reached with regard to them. If they require an extraordinary expenditure of money they may have to go to the Minister of the Interior and the Minister of Finance, or await the making up of the budget for the next fiscal year. In any event twelve months or more elapse before their fate is finally determined. Somewhere and by somebody objection is almost sure to be made, either to the plans themselves, or to the amount of money that they require, and the documents are returned to us for modification or amendment in accordance with the suggestions of some official who knows little or nothing about our needs and circumstances. Thus, a year or more after the departure for St. Petersburg of our plans and estimates they come back to us for alteration. We alter them in such a way as to meet the views of

1 I do not pretend to quote Lieutenant-Colonel Saltstein's exact words, but I give accurately, I think, the

substance of his statements.

again. In the mean time the personnel of the Prison Department has perhaps changed. New officials have taken the places of the old; new ideas with regard to prisons and prison reform have become prevalent; and our modified plans and estimates, which would have satisfied the prison authorities of 1880, are found defective by the prison authorities of 1882. After the lapse of another period of sixteen or eighteen months the papers again come back to us for revision and alteration. And so it goes year after year. Plans and estimates for a new prison at the mine of Algachi have been in existence ever since 1880. Meanwhile they have twice been to St. Petersburg and back, and are now there for the third time. What are you going to do about it? Even when the erection of a new prison has been authorized, the work proceeds very slowly. It is now almost ten years since the Government actually began to build a new brick prison at the mine of Gorni Zerentui (Gor'nee Zer-en-tooee), and the carpenters have n't even got the roof on, to say nothing about floors."

"But," I said, "such a system is all wrong; there's no sense in such management. What is the use of corresponding for years with indifferent officials in St. Petersburg about a matter that might be settled in twenty-four hours by the governor of the province, or even by a petty ispravnik? All over Eastern Siberia I have found miserable, decaying, tumbledown log prisons, and everywhere in such prisons I have seen able-bodied convicts living month after month in absolute idleness. The country is full of trees suitable for timber, you have plenty of labor that costs you nothing, every Russian peasant knows how to put up a log building—why don't you let your idle convicts build prisons for themselves?"

"We have n't a strong enough convoy here to guard convicts in the woods," said the warden; "they would escape." "That is no reason," I replied. "It is easy enough for a government like yours to strengthen the convoy during the time that the timber is being cut; and suppose that a few of the prisoners do escape. From my point of view it would be better to let half of them escape than to keep them shut up in idleness in such a prison as this. Nobody yet has given me a satisfactory explanation of the fact that, although hundreds, if not thousands, of convicts lie idle for months or years in overcrowded and decaying log prisons, no attempt is made to utilize their labor in the erection of larger and better buildings."

The warden shrugged his shoulders in the significant Russian way, but did not pursue the subject. I have never seen any reason to

change the opinion that I formed at Algachi with regard to this prison. As a place of confinement, even for the worst class of offenders, it was a disgrace to a civilized state, and the negligence, indifference, and incompetence shown by the Government in dealing with its admitted evils were absolutely inexcusable. After having thanked Lieutenant-Colonel Saltstein for his hospitality and for his courtesy in showing us the prison, Mr. Frost and I set out, with Mr. Nesterof, for the Algachi mine, which is situated about a mile from the village, on the northern slope of one of the great mountain waves that form the valley. The day was clear and pleasant, but very cold; the ground was everywhere covered with snow, and a most dreary arctic landscape was presented to us as we rode from the prison down into the valley. A few hundred yards from the village our attention was attracted to half a dozen dark objects - apparently animals of some kind on the white slope of the adjacent hill.

"I verily believe," said Mr. Frost, after a prolonged stare at them," that they 're camels!" "Camels!" I exclaimed incredulously. "Who ever heard of camels at the mines of Nerchinsk? and how could they live in such a climate as this?"

As we drew nearer to them, however, it became evident that camels they were. To whom they belonged, whence they had come, and whither they were going I do not know; but it seemed strange enough to see a herd of great double-humped Bactrian camels nibbling the tufts of frost-bitten grass that appeared here and there above the snow in the foreground of that bleak, desolate, arctic landscape.

If we had expected to find at the mine of Algachi the buildings, the steam-engines, the hoisting machinery, and the stamp-mills that would have marked the location of an American mine, we should have been greatly disappointed. The mining-plant consisted of a powder-magazine, a roofed-over cellar used for the storage of dynamite, a shanty or two, and a small log tool-house which served also as a smithy, a repair shop, a crushing and sorting room, and a guard-house. In the building last mentioned half a dozen convicts, including two or three women, were breaking up ore with short hammers and sorting it into piles, an overseer was sharpening a drill on an old worn grindstone, and three or four soldiers were lounging on a low bench, over which, in a rack against the wall, hung their Berdan rifles. It was, without exception, the most feeble exhibition of mining activity that I had ever witnessed.

Mr. Nesterof did not seem inclined to go down into the mine with us, but turned us over

to one of the convicts, who, he said, would show us all that there was to be seen. Meanwhile he himself would attend to some matters of business and await our reappearance. Our guide gave to each of us an unsheltered tallow candle, with a piece of paper wrapped around it, provided himself with a similar light, thrust half a dozen dynamite cartridges about as big as cannon firecrackers into the breast of his sheepskin coat in such a manner as to leave the long white fuses hanging out, and said that he was ready. We followed him out of the tool-house, ascended the mountain-side about a hundred yards, and entered through a narrow wooden door a low horizontal gallery the sides of which were timbered and upon whose inclined floor had been laid a rude wooden tramway. Stopping for a moment just inside the door to light our candles, we groped our way in a half-crouching attitude along the low gallery, our convict guide stumbling now and then over the loose planks in such a way as to suggest to my mind the idea that he would eventually fall down, bring the flame of his light into contact with the dangling fuses of his dynamite cartridges, and blow us all out of the tunnel like wads from a Fourth-of-July cannon. About 150 feet from the entrance we came to the black, unguarded mouth of the main shaft, out of which projected the end of a worn, icy ladder. Down this our guide climbed with practiced ease, shouting back at us a warning to be careful where we stepped, since some of the rungs were missing and the ladders were set diagonally parallel with one another at such an angle as to necessitate a long stride across the shaft from the bottom of one to the top of the next. We were not half as much afraid, however, of losing our foothold as we were of being blown into fragments by an accidental explosion of his dynamite cartridges. I still had a vivid remembrance of the ghastly forms lying under the bloody sheets in the prison hospital, and every time I looked down and saw the guide's candle swaying back and forth in close proximity to the white fuses that hung out of the breast of his sheepskin coat I could not help imagining the appearance that I should present when laid out for surgical treatment, or perhaps for burial, on one of those dirty prison cots.

As we slowly descended into the depths of the mine, sometimes on ladders and sometimes on slippery notched logs, I became conscious of a peculiar, unpleasant odor, which I presumed to be due to a recent explosion of dynamite in one of the adjacent galleries. Our candles began to burn blue and finally went out altogether, matches could hardly be made to light, and we found ourselves clinging to a

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worn ladder, in total darkness, over a bottomless abyss, wondering how long air that would not support combustion would support life. We did not feel any sensation of oppression, nor did we seem to be in any immediate danger of asphyxiation; but there was evidently very little of oxygen in the air, and we were not a little relieved when, by dint of striking innumerable matches, we succeeded in groping our way down two or three more ladders to the mouth of a gallery where our candles would again burn. Along this gallery we proceeded for a hundred yards or more, clambering here and there over piles of glittering ore which convicts were carrying on small hand-barrows to one of the hoisting shafts. The temperature of the mine seemed to be everywhere below the freezing point, and in many places the walls and roof were thickly incrusted with frost-crystals, which sparkled in the candlelight as if the gallery were lined with gems. After wandering about hither and thither in a maze of low, narrow passages, we came to another shaft, and descended another series of worn, icy ladders to the deepest part of the mine. Here six or eight men were at work getting out ore and drilling holes in the rock for the insertion of blasting cartridges. Their tools and appliances were of the rudest, most primitive description, and the way in which the work was being carried on would have brought VOL. XXXVIII.-107.

CAMELS GRAZING IN THE SNOW NEAR THE ALGACHI MINE.

a contemptuous smile to the face of a Nevada miner. The air almost everywhere on the lower level had been exhausted of its oxygen and vitiated by explosives to such an extent that our candles went out almost as fast as we could relight them; but no adequate provision had been made for renewing the air supply. The only ventilating apparatus in use was a circular iron fan, or blower, which a single convict turned by means of a clumsy wooden crank. It made a loud rumbling noise that could be heard all over the lower part of the mine, but, as there were no pipes to it or from it, it was absolutely useless. It merely agitated the impure air a little in the immediate vicinity, and so far as desirable results were concerned the convict who operated it might as well have turned a grindstone.

After wandering about the mine for half an hour, examining at various points the silver-bearing veins, collecting specimens of the ore, and watching the work of the sheepskin-coated convicts, we retraced our steps to the bottom of the main shaft, laboriously climbed up thirty or forty ladders and notched logs to the upper level, and

returned to the tool-house.

A cold, piercing wind was blowing across the desolate mountain-side, and ten or fifteen shivering convicts who had finished their day's task and

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were standing in a group near the tool-house asked permission of Mr. Nesterof to return to their prison, where they might at least keep warm. He told them rather roughly that the day's output of ore had not all been "sorted," and that they must wait. There was no place where they could go for shelter; they had had nothing to eat since morning; and for an hour and a half or more they were compelled to stand out-of-doors on the snow, exposed to a piercing wind, in a temperature below zero, while the "sorters" in the tool-house were finishing their work. It was, perhaps, a trivial thing, but it showed a hardness and indifference to suffering on the part of the mining officials that went far to confirm the statements made to us by the young technologist from St. Petersburg. Mr. Nesterof seemed to be irritated by the very reasonable request of the half-frozen convicts as if it was an evidence of impudence and insubordination.

After watching for a few moments the breaking up and sorting of the ore in the tool-house we drove to the Pokrofski (Po-kroff'skee) mine, which was situated on the side of another bare mountain ridge about four miles farther to the north-westward. The country between the two mines was as dreary and desolate as any we had yet traversed. Not a tree nor a bush

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