The night was wet and stormy as our weird, dismal procession passed through the slumbering city and out upon the broad highway on its journey eastward to the Ourals. Our wet clothes clung to us as we walked; the icy wind that blew across the wide open plain chilled our bones. Nevertheless, we plodded doggedly onward in silence, for conversation had been forbidden, and those who had spoken had felt the heavy thongs of the escort’s knout. The settled look of despair, and the sighs that frequently escaped my fellow-exiles, plainly showed what were their feelings at being banished from their native land. Since the day I had seen Mascha in the prison-yard I had heard nothing of her. A thousand times I had wondered what had been her fate; yet now, in my despair, I had relinquished all hope of seeing her again. Indeed, irreparable ruin had descended upon myself and my family so swiftly, that already I had grown callous as to my ultimate fate. Without trial, I had been sentenced by the Provincial Governor of Moghilev, upon the report of General Martianoff, to hard labour for life. Such, alas! was my punishment for endeavouring to rescue my poor defenceless sister from the inhuman wrath of the dissolute representative of the Tzar! I was well aware that for the Russian political convict is reserved a death by slow torture to which any other means of ending life is preferable. The silver mines in the terrible district beyond Lake Baikal are the tombs of political suspects. The Government is well aware that the conditions under which convicts work at Kara, Nerchinsk, Pokrovski, and the other distant mining settlements to which “politicals” are sent, are such as to cause death in from five to seven years. With that refinement of cruelty for which the Government has earned an unenviable notoriety, it has abolished the death sentence and substituted one more torturing in that distant land where God is high and the Tzar is far away. The prisons and _étapes_ of Siberia are foul, insanitary, half-ruined wooden structures where human beings perish like flies. Typhoid, diphtheria, and other epidemic diseases prevail there constantly, and infect all who have the misfortune to be huddled into the awful places. The grievously sick, for want of attendance, wallow on the floor in the midst of filth, and their clothes rot on their bodies; while so over-crowded are these pestilential _kameras_ by persons of all ages and both sexes, that for those who are not fever-stricken there is neither room to sit nor lie. The exiles who are consigned underground are convicts of the worst type, and political offenders of the best. The murderer for his villainy, the intelligent honest Muscovite who expresses Liberal opinions—not a whit more revolutionary than the ideas of English Radicals—are deemed equally worthy of slow, agonising death.