One notorious criminal at Kara living in the free command acquired considerable wealth by illicit trade in “stolen gold.” His name was Lissenko, and his crimes had been many and heinous. In one of his robberies he murdered a whole family, men, women and children. Leo Deutsch came across him and describes him as a man of about sixty years who had still the strength of a giant. He says: “He struck me as being crafty, cunning and reckless, but not a malicious kind of fellow, and he was extremely pious withal. No one who knew him personally could easily believe him to have murdered innocent children.” Deutsch asked him how he could have the heart to kill a child. “Oh, I cried all the time I was doing it,” he replied, “but still I killed them. It was just God’s will.” His questioner then asked, “Well, and would you murder me if you met me in a safe place?” “If I knew you had a lot of money about you I should certainly wring your neck,” said the man, with cheerful frankness. “But there! one doesn’t kill without some good reason.” The search for gold, belonging really to the government, or more exactly to the Czar, was almost openly practised at Kara. Whole families, both men and women, engaged in it, taking out with them a shovel and wooden vessel to the banks of the neighbouring streams, and often obtaining gold dust to the value of a couple of rubles a day. No one protested, and the authorities hardly interfered, for the officials themselves did not scruple to profit by the illegal trade. Far more gold was obtained by unlawful than lawful means. The middlemen got a good price from the Chinese traders, who could always find a way to pass the gold into China, where it would fetch a higher price than that paid by the imperial exchequer. It is contended that these illicit gold finders have greatly benefited Siberia. Their restless energy in prospecting has led to the discovery of numberless gold mines, which are now being very profitably worked, seldom to the enrichment of the finders, but to that of the middlemen and through them to that of the country. The glaring shortcomings of Eastern Siberian prisons were gradually recognised by the government, and a commendable, if not extensive, attempt has been made to provide new and improved buildings, both to serve as forwarding prisons, and for the confinement of penal-servitude convicts. A larger scheme was introduced for the penal colonisation of the island of Saghalien by the deportation of exiles thither by sea, of which I shall have much more to say. The best of the new prisons on the mainland are those of Alexandrovsk, forty miles above Irkutsk on the Amgara River, of Gorni Zerentui at the Nertchinsk mines, and of Verkhni Udinsk, fifty miles east of Lake Baikal and six hundred miles from Kara.