After I had given him a fictitious account of myself, he told me his story. He was a lapidary in Petersburg, and had been thrice arrested and confined in one of the bomb-proof casemates of the Prison of Petropaulovsk, because it was alleged that his freedom was “prejudicial to public order.” On the last occasion of his arrest he was condemned to hard labour for life, and sent across Siberia to the dreaded mining district beyond Irkutsk. His daughter went into voluntary exile with him, and they remained at Algachi four years. At length, aided by a Cossack officer who took compassion on the decrepit old man and his devoted child, Karelin succeeded in escaping. He then became a _brodyag_, or escaped convict who wanders about the country subsisting upon what he can beg or steal, but always travelling towards the west. In this way he managed to walk nearly a thousand miles towards the Ourals, when by good chance he fell in with a train of freight sleighs going to Nijni Novgorod fair. One of the drivers had fallen ill and died, therefore he disguised himself in the dead man’s clothes and took his place, having first, however, succeeded, with the help of some of the other men, in filing away his leg-irons. His clothes with the yellow diamond upon them he buried in a snowdrift, and with the dead man’s passport was allowed to pass safely back to Europe, after an absence of nearly five years. Soon after his arrival, however, he was stricken down by fever, and lost his eyesight. In Kazan he was joined by Elyòna, who had followed him. Afterwards they came to England. The story of the daughter’s earnest affection was a touching one, and as the old man related it tears fell from his sightless eyes. The whole narrative was intensely interesting to me, inasmuch as his description of the terrible hardships of deportation by road, of life in the filthy, insanitary _étapes_, and the horrors of the Tomsk _perisilni_, were all well known and vivid in my own recollection. It was evident that the poor old man had been subjected to the same inhuman brutality that had wrecked so many thousand lives, and none could sympathise with him more sincerely than myself. Without giving him any idea that I also had been exiled to the Great Prison Land, I questioned him upon various points, and his replies, one and all, were those of a man who had suffered in the same manner. Besides, his head had been shaved, for upon one side his white locks were thin, while on the other they grew thickly, and were of an iron grey. “What can I do?” he asked mournfully, when he had concluded his story. “The money I have will not last me much longer. I must seek work.” “But you are blind!” I exclaimed, looking into his dull, bleared, stony eyes.