on the great Siberian road. It is customary in Siberia, when traveling by post, to ride night and day without other rest than that which can be obtained in one's sleigh; but I was still suffering from the results of the previous night's exposure to storm and cold in the mountains of the Angara, and at every respiration was warned by a sharp, cutting pain in one lung that it would be prudent to seek shelter and keep warm until I should be able to breathe freely. But it was very difficult to keep warm in that poststation. Almost every hour throughout the night travelers stopped there to change horses or to drink tea, and with every opening of the door a cold wind blew across the bare floor where we lay, condensing the moisture of the atmosphere into chilly clouds of vapor, and changing the temperature of the room from twenty to thirty degrees in as many seconds. I had taken the precaution, however, to bring our large sheepskin bag into the house, and, by burying myself in the depths of that, I not only escaped being chilled, but succeeded, with the aid of medicinal remedies, in getting into a profuse perspiration. This soon relieved the pleuritic pain in my side, and in the morning I felt able to go on. Neither of us had had any sleep, but to the experienced Serian traveler deprivation of sleep for a night or two is a trifling hardship. I do not think that Mr. Frost had two consecutive hours of sleep in the whole week that we spent on the road between the Alexandrofski Central Prison and Krasnoyarsk; but when we reached the latter place he went to bed, with his clothes on, and slept sixteen hours without waking.

In several villages through which we passed between Cheromka and Nizhnibhinsk the étapes were evidently occupied by exile parties; but we did not happen to see such a party on the march until Wednesday, and it came upon us then very suddenly and unexpectedly. The day was cold and stormy, with a high wind and flying snow, and we were lying half buried in our sheepskin bag, watching for the next verst-post. The atmosphere was so thick with snowflakes that we could not see the road distinctly for a greater distance than seventy-five or one hundred yards, and the party of exiles was fairly upon us before we discovered that it was not-as we at first supposed—a train of obózes, or freight-sleighs. I was not absolutely sure of its nature until the head of the column was so near us that I could make out the muskets of the advance-guard of Cossacks and hear the familiar clinking of the prisoners' leg-fetter chains. I then ordered our yamshchik to drive out into the deep snow at one side of the road and there stop. The neral appearance of the party, as it passed

the similar party whose departure from Tomsk we had watched in August. Then the convicts were all in their hight summer costume of gray, their faces were black with sunburn, and they were enveloped in a cloud of fine yellow dust raised by their shuffing, supper-clad feet from the powdery road. The exiles before us were all dressed in reddish pélu-shubas, or short overcoats of sheepskin, and breinias, or hightopped leather boots, their faces were pallid from long confinement in the Tomsk forwarding prison, and they were wading slowly and laboriously through fresh-fallen snow. The order of march was the same as in the summer, but on account of the storm and the condition of the road there seemed to be some relaxation of discipline and a good deal of straggling and disorder. The dress of the marching convicts consisted of the usual gray Tam o' Shanter cap, with a handkerchief, a ragged tippet, or an old stocking tied over it in such a way as to protect the ears; a polu-shuba, with the reddish tanned side out; long, loose leather boots, which had been stuffed around the feet and ankles with hay to make them warmer; woolen trousers, foot-wrappers, or short woolen stockings, and big leather mittens. The leg-fetters, in most cases, were worn inside the boots, and the chain that united them was looped in the middle by means of a strap attached to the leather waist-belt. From this point of support it hung down to the ankle on each side between the tucked-in trouser-leg and the boot. With some slight changes-such, for example, as the substitution of a fur hood for the flimsy Tam o' Shanter cap-the dress, it seemed to me, would afford adequate warmth in ordinary winter weather to men whose blood was kept in vigorous circulation by exercise; but it was by no means sufficient for the protection of sick or disabled convicts who were exposed for eight or ten hours at a stretch to all sorts of weather in open vehicles. I noticed a number of such incapables lying in the shallow, uncomfortable one-horse sleighs at the rear of the column, and clinging or crouching together as if to seek warmth in mutual contact. They all seemed to be half frozen to death.

As the straggling column passed us a convict here and there left the ranks, apparently with the permission of the guard, and approaching our pavoska with bared head and extended cap, begged us, in the peculiar, half-wailing chant of the milosérdnaya,1 to “pity the unfortunate" and to "have mercy on the poor and needy, for Christ's sake." I knew that money given to them would probably be used

1 The exiles' begging-song, which I have already described and translated.

in gambling or go to the maidánshchik1 in payment for vodka; but the poor wretches looked so cold, tired, hungry, and miserable, as they tramped past us through the drifting snow on their way to the distant mines of the TransBaikál, that my feelings ran away with my prudential philosophy, and I put a few kopeks into every gray cap that was presented to me. The convicts all stared at us with curiosity as they passed; some greeted us pleasantly, a few removed their caps, and in five minutes they were gone, and a long, dark, confused line of moving objects was all that I could see as I looked after them through the white drift of the storm.

After we passed the party of convicts our monotonous life of night-and-day travel was not diversified by a single noteworthy incident. Now and then we met a rich merchant or an army officer posting furiously toward Irkutsk, or passed a long caravan of rude one-horse sledges laden with hide-bound chests of tea for the Nízhni Novgorod fair, but we saw no more exiles; the country through which we passed was thinly settled and uninteresting, and the wretched little villages where we stopped to change horses or to refresh ourselves with tea were literally buried in drifts of snow. At the post-station of Kamishétskaya, five hundred and thirty versts west of Irkutsk, we overtook two political offenders named Shamárin and Peterson who had just finished their terms of administrative exile in Eastern Siberia, and were on their way back to European Russia. We had made their acquaintance some weeks before in Irkutsk, and had agreed to travel with them, if possible, as far as Krasnoyarsk; but our route differed somewhat from theirs at the outset, and, owing to our detention at the Alexandrofski Central Prison and to our various mishaps on the Angara, we had fallen a little behind them. They greeted us joyously, shared their supper with us, and after an hour or two of animated conversation, in which we related to one another our several adventures and experiences, we put on our heavy shubas, again climbed into our respective pavoskas, and with two troikas of horses went on together.

As we approached the town of Kansk, Thursday, January 14, the sky cleared and the weather suddenly became colder. The thermometer fell that night to thirty degrees below zero, and on the following night to forty degrees below. We continued to travel without stop, but suffered intensely from cold, particularly during the long hours between

1 The maidánshchik occupies something like the same position in a convict party that a sutler occupies regiment of soldiers. Although a prisoner himself, allowed, by virtue of long-established custom, to a small stock of such luxuries as tea, sugar, and

midnight and dawn, when it was impossible to get any warm food at the post-stations, and when all our vital powers were at their lowest ebb. More than once, notwithstanding the weight and warmth of our outer clothing, we became so stiff and chilled between stations that we could hardly get out of our pavoska. Sleep, of course, was out of the question. Even if the temperature had not made it perilous, the roughness of the road would have rendered it impossible. Under the conjoint action of a dozen howling Arctic gales and four or five thousand pounding freight-sledges, the deep snow that lay on this part of the road had been drifted and packed into a series of huge transverse waves known to travelers in Siberia as ukhábi. These billows of solidified snow measured four or five feet vertically from trough to summit, and fifteen or twenty feet horizontally from crest to crest, and the jolting and banging of our heavy pavoska, as it mounted the slope of one wave and plunged into the hollow of the next, jarred every bone and shocked every nerve-ganglion in one's body. I finally became so much exhausted, as a result of cold, sleeplessness, and jolting, that at every post-station, particularly in the night, I would throw myself on the floor, without blanket or pillow, and catch five or ten minutes' sleep while the horses were being harnessed. At the lonely post-station of Kuskúnskaya, about eleven o'clock one night, I threw myself down in this way on a narrow plank bench in the travelers' room, fell asleep, and dreamed that I had just been invited to make an extempore address to a Sunday-school. The school was in the church of a religious denomination called the "Holy Monopolists." I inquired what the "Holy Monopolists" were, and was informed that they were a new sect consisting of people who believed in only one thing. I wanted very much to ask. what that one thing was, but felt ashamed to do so, because it seemed to me that I ought to know without asking. I entered the Sundayschool room, which was an amphitheater of seats with a low platform in the middle, and saw, standing on the platform and acting in the capacity of superintendent, a well-known citizen of Norwalk, Ohio, whom I had not seen before since boyhood. All the scholars of the Sunday-school, to my great surprise, were standing in their places with their backs to the platform. As I came in, however, the superintendent said, “You will now please resume your seats," and the boys and girls all turned

white bread, for sale to his fellow prisoners; and at the same time, with the aid of the soldiers of the convoy whom he bribes, he deals surreptitiously in tobacco, playing-cards, and vódka.