THE band of exiles had several days' rest before the convict-barge which was to carry them up the Volga returned. This gave them all time to recover from their terrible railway journey. The women washed and mended the clothes. But there was no decent privacy. In the family kameras men and boys were confined with women and girls in an indiscriminate herding together. More than anything else, worse than the filth and the vermin about them, the modest Stundist women felt this indecent exposure. But there was no help for it. They did not even dare to hold themselves altogether aloof from the coarse, wretched women who were forced upon their companionship. Alexis and Khariton urged them to do any little act of kindness in their power both to women and children. They themselves sought to gain an influence over the men; they talked to them, wrote letters for them, and made many efforts to interest them and wile away the tedious hours of idleness. The days dragged heavily along, and most of the men spent them in gambling and quarrelling. Over the big boys and girls, Michael, Sergius, and Marfa soon exercised a good influence. Michael especially could interest them by long stories of his voyage out to Scotland and his twelve months' sojourn there. He could talk for hours of that foreign country; and the boys squatted round him in the prison-yard, listening with breathless attention to his tales of his brave forefathers, the Covenanters, their hairbreadth escapes and courageous deaths. So the days passed by, spent altogether out of doors in an enclosed yard with high palisadings, which shut out all glimpses of the world outside, excepting the blue sky overhead. But every night they had to herd in the unventilated kamera, reeking with foul air, and swarming with vermin. It was better at night than in the morning, for the open door had admitted some fresh air. But after the kamera had been closed an hour or two, the atmosphere was poisonous. This misery would follow them all along the route to the very end. At last the convict-barge arrived, and the men were separated from the women and children. More convicts joined the band from Kovylsk, and there was much overcrowding. But this was nothing like as bad as it would be later in the year, when the bands of exiles would be larger. There was no yard here to pass the days in. Instead were two big cages of strong bars, in which the exiles were able to stand upright, though it was almost impossible to move easily about. In the railway waggons they had been compelled to sit, and could not stand. Here they were compelled to stand, and could not sit. But unless they stayed in the foul atmosphere of the cabins below, which no fresh air could enter, they must stand all day long, closely packed in these cages, more like wild beasts than human beings.