was to be seen in any direction, and the rolling, snow-clad mountains suggested in general contour the immense surges and mounds of water raised by a hurricane at sea. The buildings at the entrance to the mine consisted of a tool-house like that at the mine of Algachi, a magazine or storehouse, a few A-shaped shanties, in which lived the convicts of the free command, and two small prisons, one of which

all and the shaft and galleries were dripping with moisture. The air in the Pokrofski mine seemed to be pure and our candles everywhere burned freely. Only a few men were at work, and they seemed to be engaged in hauling up ore in small buckets by means of a cable and a primitive hand-windlass.

After climbing up and down slippery ladders until I was covered with mud, and walking in

THE POKROFSKI MINE.

was apparently new. On the summit of a rocky ridge just over these buildings were two sentry-boxes, in each of which stood an armed soldier on guard. Mr. Frost, who was very tired, did not care to inspect any more mines, and taking a position on the snow near the tool-house

he proceeded, with hands encased in thick gloves, to make a sketch of the scene, while Mr. Nesterof and I, under the guidance of a convict, descended the main shaft. The Pokrofski mine did not differ essentially from that of Algachi, except that it was not so extensive nor so deep. The air in it was damp and comparatively warm, water dripped from the roofs of the galleries into little pools here and there on the floors, and the ladders in the main shaft were slippery with mud. Why it should thaw in this mine and freeze in the mine of Algachi, only four miles away, I could not understand, nor did Mr. Nesterof seem to be able to give me a satisfactory explanation. In the mine of Algachi there was no water and the galleries for seventy-five or a hundred feet together were lined with frost-crystals and ice. In the mine of Pokrofski there was no ice at

THE POKROFSKI PRISON.

a bent posture through low galleries until my back ached, I told Mr. Nesterof that I was satisfied, and we returned, tired and bathed in perspiration, to the tool-house. The convict who had accompanied us through the mine blew out his tallow candle, and without taking the trouble completely to extinguish the wick, laid it, still all aglow, in a small wooden box, which contained among other things a dynamite cartridge big enough to blow the whole toolhouse into the air. I did not regard myself as naturally timorous or nervous, but when the convict shut down the lid of that box over the long glowing wick of a tallow candle and a dynamite cartridge with fuse attached, I had business out-of-doors. When I thought time enough had elapsed for the wick to go out, I reëntered the house, washed my muddy hands in the grindstone trough, inspected Mr. Frost's

sketches, and asked Mr. Nesterof a long series of questions about the mines.

The silver-bearing veins or lodes in the mines of Algachi and Pokrofski vary in thickness from 12 or 14 inches to 5 or 6 feet. The ore, which has a bright glittering appearance, consists of silver and lead in the proportion of about I to 100, with a greater or less admixture of what the Russian miners call "zinkovi obmanka" (zink-o'vee ob-man'kah) or "zinc deceit." As the metal last named is much less fusible than lead, it becomes very troublesome in the reducing furnaces, and, so far as possible, the miners get rid of it by breaking up the ore into small pieces and discarding that part of it in which the zinc predominates. The work of crushing and sorting is performed by the weaker male convicts and the women, and is regarded as the lightest form of hard labor. It is about equivalent to breaking stones on the road with a heavy, short-handled hammer. Out of the mines of Algachi and Pokrofski, which are the most productive in the district, there are taken every year nearly 400 short tons of ore, which, when reduced, yields about 1440 pounds of silver, valued at $20,000, and 144,000 pounds of lead. The lead, owing to the expense of transportation to a market, is virtually worthless, and at the time of our visit nearly 2000 tons of it were lying at the Kutomarski (Kooto-mar'skee) Zavod, where the ore from these mines for many years has been reduced. The average number of convicts employed in the two mines is 220, and each of them gets out 3600 pounds of ore a year, or about 10 pounds a day. These figures alone are enough to show how feebly and inefficiently the mines are worked. Until the early part of 1885 the convicts were sent down the shafts every day in the year with the exception of a few great church holy days, but since that time they have been allowed two days' rest a month, viz., the 1st and the 15th. They work by stents, or "tasks," which can be completed by able-bodied men in from eight to ten hours. They receive, in quantity and kind, substantially the same food and clothing that are given to the hard-labor convicts at the mines of Kara, and their maintenance costs the Government about $40 a year, or a little less than 11 cents a day per capita. Regarded as places of punishment the Nerchinsk mines did not seem to me so terrible as they are often represented to be. It is not very pleasant, of course, to work eight or ten hours every day in a damp or icy gallery 300 feet underground; but even such employment is, I think, less prejudicial to health than unbroken confinement in a dirty, overcrowded, and foulsmelling convict prison. The mines are badly ventilated and the gases liberated in them by the explosives used are doubtless injurious;

but there are no deadly fumes or exhalations from poisonous ores like cinnabar to affect the health of the laborers, and experience seems to show that the death rate is no higher among the convicts who go regularly every day into the mines than among those who lie idle day after day in the vitiated air of the prison kameras. If I were permitted to make choice between complete idleness in such a prison as that of Algachi or Ust Kara and regular daily labor in the mines, I should, without hesitation, choose the latter. So far as I could ascertain by careful inquiry among the convicts themselves, no one has ever been compelled to live and sleep in these mines day and night, and I believe that all the stories to that effect published from time to time are wholly imaginary and fictitious. The working force may occasionally have been divided into day and night gangs, or shifts, sent into the mines alternately, but the same men have never been required to remain there continuously for twenty-four hours. At the present time there is no night work and all of the convicts return to their prisons before dark, or in the short days of midwinter very soon after dark. I do not wish to be understood as saying that the life of Russian convicts at the Nerchinsk silver mines is an easy one, or that they do not suffer. I can hardly imagine a more terrible and hopeless existence than that of a man who works all day in one of the damp, muddy galleries of the Pokrofski mine, and goes back at night to a close, foul, vermin-infested prison like that of Algachi. It is worse than the life of any pariah dog, but at the same time it is not the sensationally terrible life of the fictitious convict described by Mr. Grenville Murray-the convict who lives night and day underground, sleeps in a rocky niche, toils in hopeless misery under the lash of a pitiless overseer, and is slowly poisoned to death by the fumes of quicksilver. Such things may be effective in a sensational drama, but they are not true. The worst feature of penal servitude in Siberia is not hard labor in the mines; it is the condition of the prisons.

When Mr. Frost, Mr. Nesterof, and I returned from the Pokrofski mine to the village of Algachi it was beginning to grow dark, and the village girls were watering their cows and filling their icy buckets at a curbed spring or well near the zemski kvartir. We drove to the house of Mr. Nesterof for dinner, spent an hour or two in conversation, and devoted the remainder of the evening to writing up note-books and completing sketches.

Friday morning, November 20, we bade Mr. Nesterof and Lieutenant-Colonel Saltstein good-bye, and set out with two horses, a small uncomfortable telega, and a fresh supply of

provisions for the village and mine of Kadaiya (Kah-dy'ya), distant from Algachi about ninety miles. The weather was still very cold, the road ran through the same dreary, desolate sea of snow-covered mountains that surrounds this mine of Algachi, and for two days we neither saw nor heard anything of particular interest. At half-past eleven o'clock Friday night, tired, hungry, and half frozen, we reached the village of Dono (Doh-noh'), forty-six miles from Algachi; Saturday afternoon we passed the Kutomarski Zavod, where we stopped for two or three hours to examine the smelting works; and early Sunday morning, after having traveled nearly all night at the expense of not a little suffering from cold and hunger, we finally reached the miserable, forlorn mining village of Kadaiya, found the zemski kvartir, and as soon as we could warm and refresh ourselves a little with tea went promptly to bed-Mr. Frost on top of the large brick oven, and I on the floor.

About ten o'clock Sunday forenoon we got up, somewhat rested and refreshed, and after a hasty and rather unsatisfactory breakfast of bread and tea went out into the broad, snowy, and deserted street of the village - Mr. Frost to make a sketch, and I to find the ustavshchik (00-stav'shchik), or officer in charge of the

mine.

The Kadainski mine, which is one of the oldest and most extensive silver mines in the Ner

chinsk district, is situated on the side of a bold, steep, round-topped mountain about 300 yards from the village and 200 or 300 feet above it. It has been worked for more than a century and was at one time very productive; but the richest veins of ore in it have been exhausted, and it does not now yield nearly as much silver as the Pokrofski mine or the mine of Algachi.

The ustavshchik, whom I found at work in a log-house near the mine, and who seemed to be an intelligent and well-educated Siberian peasant, received me pleasantly but with some surprise, read my letters of introduction, expressed his willingness to show me everything that I desired to see, and in ten minutes we were on our way to the mine. In the tool-house, which stood over the mouth of the main shaft, I put on the outer dress of one of the convicts,which I soon found to be full of vermin,-the ustavshchik donned a long, mud-stained khalat, a battered uniform cap, and a pair of heavy leather mittens, and providing ourselves with tallow candles we lowered ourselves into the black mouth of the Voskresenski (Voss-kre-sen'skee) or Ascension shaft. After descending ten or twelve ladders, we reached, at a depth of about 120 feet, a spacious chamber from which radiated three or four horizontal galleries much wider and higher than any that I had seen in the mines of Pokrofski and Algachi. The floor of the chamber was covered with water to a depth of three or four inches and moisture was

now and then into a hole or splashing into a pool of water, and imagining for an instant that I had tumbled into an abandoned shaft. In one place we passed a very extensive excavation, out of which the ustavshchik said an immense body of ore had been taken as long ago as the middle of the last century. An immense area of roof had been left supported by quadrangular piles of crossed logs, which were so black from lapse of time that they were hardly recognizable as wood, and in many cases so soft that I could take pinches of rotten fiber out of them with my fingers. This part of the mine the ustavshchik said was regarded as very dangerous, and he did not think it prudent to go any farther. From the point where we turned to retrace our steps black, irregular caverns could still be seen stretching away in every direction

the solid rock at an angle of about forty-five degrees and not provided with ladders. A heavy and rusty chain had been festooned against one side by means of staples driven into holes drilled in the rock, and clinging to this chain we cautiously descended the shaft with a stream of water running ankle-deep around our legs and tumbling in cascades into the depths of the mine. On the lowest level that we reached a party of convicts was at work blasting out a new gallery with dynamite. A perpendicular climb of 300 or 400 feet up slippery ladders in another shaft brought us once more to the surface, and when, wet, muddy, and breathless, I stepped from the end of the last ladder upon the floor of the toolhouse I was so exhausted that I could hardly stand on my feet.

George Kennan.