as in "The Tempest," enchanted with invisible music, where life is painted like a soap bubble-iridescent and empty. What likeness can there be between these exquisite fairy tales, made of dreams, and the comedy of Molière, all kneaded with reality?

There are exceptions, however. There is one of Shakspere's comedies that approaches the French manner: it is the "Taming of the Shrew." This has a logical action and a moral. Petruchio tames his devilish wife by showing himself more of a devil than she. But they both are eccentrics rather than true characters; and the play is a farce, where caricature injures the truth. No matter, it is one of the gayest, and see the power of the French form it has remained one of the most popular. He has been less successful, to my mind, in the "Merry Wives of Windsor," another exception in his works, for it is a contemporaneous satire, notwithstanding the date, and a portrait of middle-class manners. It has excellent scenes. Ford recalls our Arnolphe. Like Arnolphe he is jealous, like Arnolphe he is kept informed of all that is being prepared against him (at least he thinks so), and like Arnolphe he succeeds only in getting himself laughed at. But how feeble and brutal he is! What unreason in all his actions! In short, he is any husband, while Arnolphe, in representing the old sect which insists on the subjection of woman, is one of those faces in which the humanity of all times recognizes itself laughing at the recognition. Even in the Falstaff of the "Merry Wives" one can pick flaws. Is this the Falstaff of "Henry IV.," who was always brimming over with audacity and humor? Alas! how he is faded! What a fall! No, no; this dupe is not Falstaff! Shakspere was no more at ease in working on an idea of Elizabeth's than was Molière when he composed the "Magnificent Lovers" on an outline of Louis XIV.'s.

A few words must be added on the wit of Shakspere, the sparkling of which fills the first plays of Shakspere. It is with double meanings, with puns, that he makes the laughter break out; counterfeit coin, doubtless, but so prettily struck off, so brilliant, so resonant! Recall the battles of wit between Beatrice and Benedict, and the loving chatter of Rosalind and the elegant babble of Mercutio. But all this has sadly cooled in three centuries.

Molière has no mere wit. Puns, points, the collocation of droll sounds, words taken one for another-all these are absent from his work. At most he permits himself, in his farces, some Gallic equivoques. He wishes to bring a laugh only by touches of nature. It is not from him as author that come his witticisms; it is from his characters, and they come naturally and by the force of things. He himself explains this

in his criticism. "The author has not put this in as a clever saying of his own, but only as a thing that characterizes the man." So with him there is nothing unnecessary. Each touch brings out the character in the living reality.

Can we here say that from this point of view Molière has the better of his rival? But it would be easy to reply that Shakspere in his mighty maturity renounced witticisms to seek effects only from nature. And it is by their masterpieces that these great men must be compared. Thus we admire in them the same creative fecundity, the same intensity of life, the same dramatic vigor. This latter is so great in Molière that it was able to lead astray his fervent admirer the great Goethe, who attributed to him tragic genius. This seems an error; but nothing shows better than this error the force of the situations in "The Misanthrope," in "Tartuffe," and elsewhere. They have suggested to Molière, as to Shakspere, those phrases that suddenly shed light into the very depths of the soul. Pathetic in Shakspere, comic in Molière, they are sublime in both. Sublime, you say? Can the comic be sublime? Why not? After all, the sublime is but a stroke of truth, so brilliant, so deep, that it calls for no explanation or reasoning, leaves nothing to be said, and sometimes-like the Qu'il mourût of the old Horace-attains a pure and simple absurdity.

Even in Shakspere there are strokes of this kind of comedy; such is the famous acclamation of the "Brutus! Hail Brutus! Let Brutus be Cæsar."And another saying, in "Coriolanus," "Let us kill Marcius, and we 'll have corn at our own price." As for the pathetic cries it is unnecessary for me to recall the apostrophe of Lear to the storm, "Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire, are my daughters!" Nor the saying of Macduff, "He has no children!" Nor all those that spring from the troubled conscience of Hamlet. But is not the Poor Man in "Tartuffe" of the same caliber? Does not Alceste's "Morbleu! Faut-il que je vous aime?" spring from the same depths? And the innocent question of Arnolphe, "Why not love me, Madam Impudence?" But Molière has whole scenes written in this tone. Recall the scene before the last in the third act of "Tartuffe" between Orgon, Tartuffe, and Damis. There is not a line that does not carry. If it were not so funny it would be terrible. Never has human credulity been so truly painted, neither has the faculty which Tartuffes have of dishumanizing the best of us. If one forgets to laugh, the scene leaves an impression of stupefaction, and this I think is the duty of the sublime.

In Shakspere Othello is less deeply duped by Iago. For from the moment that he has

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

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.

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'clock— warm, comfortable, and happy.