_Effect of Dungeon Life_.--"You can not imagine, Mr. Kennan," said a condemned revolutionist to me in Siberia, "the misery of prolonged confinement in a casemate of the fortress under what are known as dungeon conditions. My casemate was sometimes cold, generally damp, and always gloomy. Day after day, week after week, month after month, I lay there in solitude, hearing no sound save that of the high-pitched, melancholy bells of the fortress cathedral, which slowly chimed the quarter hours, and which always seemed to say: 'Here thou liest--lie here still.' I had absolutely nothing to do except to pace my cell from corner to corner, and think. For a long time I used to talk to myself in a whisper; to repeat softly everything in the shape of literature that I could remember, and to compose speeches which, under certain imagined conditions, I would deliver; but I finally ceased to have energy enough to do even this, and used to sit for hours in a sort of stupor, in which, so far as I can now remember, I was not conscious of thinking at all. Before the end of the first year, I grew so weak, mentally and physically, that I began to forget words. I knew what ideas I desired to express, but some of the words that I needed had gone from me, and it was with the greatest difficulty that I could recover them. It seemed sometimes as if my own language were a strange one to me, or one which, from long disuse, I had forgotten. I greatly feared insanity, and my apprehension was increased by the fact that two or three of my comrades in cells on the same corridor were either insane or subject to hallucinations; and I was often roused at night and thrown into a violent chill of nervous excitement by their hysterical weeping, their cries to the guard to come and take away somebody, or something which they imagined they saw, or their groans and entreaties when, in cases of violent delirium, they were strapped to their beds by the _gendarmes_."--GEORGE KENNAN, _in Russian State Prisoners, The Century, March, 1888_. THE GROWTH AND POWER OF POISON HABITS (p. 218).--In order to distinguish a poison stimulant from a harmless and nutritive substance, Nature has furnished us three infallible tests: 1. The first taste of every poison is either insipid or repulsive. 2. The persistent obtrusion of the noxious substance changes that aversion into a specific craving. 3. The more or less pleasurable excitement produced by a gratification of that craving is always followed by a depressing reaction....