How shall men--and women no less--without a weapon, make head against their keepers armed to the teeth? How shall men possessed of nothing fight legionaries with the empire behind them? Even when a man has nothing, so long as he lives he has his life; and when a man counts his life as less than nothing he rises above his nature and becomes a menace and a danger to the oppressor. The power which strips him of every thing but life thereby leaves him his sole means of defence. With their bare lives the abjects fight the ruthlessness that would trample them below the mud, and they generally win. For, strangely enough, the autocratic power which condemns its victims to extremest bitterness of life still objects to their dying. Savage as are its methods, it still covets rank among the civilised of the earth; and an acute, hypersensitive fear of forfeiting its precarious position serves to hold its punitive hand just this side of death. It insists on life where death would be a grace. At times, indeed, its victims are driven to madness and despair. But that is not of first intention, it is incidental to the system, not authorised by it. For how shall a Government, which cannot keep its sheep in hand, control the doings of its underlings and wolf-dogs in the pastures five thousand miles away? So when, through extra brutality, or the callous stupidity which is kin to it, the oppressed are driven to despair, they calmly say, "We prefer to die"; and, since other means are denied them, they say, "We will die of hunger," and they refuse to eat. Then it becomes a case of endurance and bitter suffering on the one side, and of much trepidation on the other. For if these men die wholesale, and in such a manner, inquisition must follow and a calling to account. Yet the ruthlessness that has provoked so dire a test fears for its future control if it yield too soon. And so the dreadful duel goes on. On the one side threats and futile attempts at forced feeding, followed in due course by promises; and on the other side the long-drawn agonies of slow starvation and the invincible determination to die sooner than give in. Such is a hunger-strike among the Siberian exiles, and when Pavlof came in one day from his visitation of the prison with a clouded face, Madame Roskova was quick to perceive it. It was the day Hope broke cover perforce and joined them in the outer room, and Madame had been jubilantly waiting his coming to reap the reward of her careful ministry. "Here she is, Serge Petrovitch, and almost herself again! A little frozen yet, maybe, but you must complete the cure yourself. Nu! What's the matter with the man now?" as Pavlof bent and kissed Hope's forehead, and the blood rushed up into her pale face to meet his unavoidable salute. "There is trouble up at the prison, Anna Vassilievna," he said gravely.