The passionate craving for freedom has been well described by Dostoyevski. “At the first song of the lark throughout all Siberia and Russia, men set out on the tramp; God’s creatures, if they can break their prison and escape into the woods.... They go vagabondising where they please, wherever life seems to them most agreeable and easy; they drink and eat what they can find; at night they sleep undisturbed and without a care in the woods or in a field;... saying good night only to the stars; and the eye that watches them is the eye of God. It is not altogether a rosy lot: sometimes they suffer hunger and fatigue ‘in the service of General Cuckoo.’ Often enough the wanderers have not a morsel of bread to keep their teeth going for days at a time.... They are almost all brigands and thieves by necessity rather than inclination.... This life in the woods, wretched and fearful as it is, but still free and adventurous, has a mysterious seduction for those who have experienced it.” A curious illustration of this consuming passion is to be found in the case of an aged convict who had become the servant of a high official at the Kara gold mines. This man ran away periodically at the return of spring, and although suffering always the same terrible privations, was brought back in irons. At last, at the fateful moment, he came to his master and begged that he might be locked up. “I am a _brodyaga_, heart and soul, quite irreclaimable, and I cannot resist the cuckoo’s call. Please do me the favour to put me under lock and key so that I cannot go off.” He was closely confined until the summer passed, and when the fever of unrest left him, he was released and became quiet, contented and docile as ever. A convict who has earned conditional freedom and received a grant of land, may have married, had children and lived quietly for some years, when suddenly some day he will have disappeared, abandoning wife and family, to the stupefaction of everybody. Vagrancy is in his blood. He probably was a deserter before his conviction; the passion for wandering has always possessed him. He has hungered after a change of lot, and nothing would hold him, not even his family, much less police surveillance or prison bars.