form were stamped the unmistakable brand of criminality, imbecility, moral crookedness and general degeneration.” The testing prison at Alexandrovsk generally held some six hundred inmates, many of them in chains and most of them in idleness; a few, barely ten or twelve per cent., were occasionally sent out to be employed in mining, road-making and log-hauling; and the authorities justified this limitation by the plea that the majority of them were such desperate characters that they could not safely be suffered to go beyond the walls. The unutterable weariness of long-continued, unbroken idleness bore so heavily upon this mass of caged and shackled humanity that desperate and determined attempts at escape were of constant occurrence. So great was their longing to be free that they would willingly risk their lives to breathe the fresh air. The only break in the dull round of prison life was surreptitious gambling. They would sacrifice everything to secure the means of play; they would stake the government clothing issued, and even their rations a month ahead. In the latter case, as an alternative to punishment, the convict put himself in pawn to the authorities. He was lodged in a separate cell and allowed himself to be starved for two days out of every three; the rations saved were accumulated and placed to his credit for the payment of his debt. The conditions of life at Alexandrovsk not strangely incited the prisoners to turbulence, insubordination and the commission of crime whenever the chance came. When at large, even for a short time after successful escape, they were veritable brigands, robbing and slaughtering; when once more incarcerated, they were intractable and incorrigible, and no punishment could affright or keep them in order. The older brutal methods survive in Saghalien. Physical tortures are superadded to the infliction of prolonged sentences. As to the latter, many convicts are well advanced in life with unexpired sentences of forty or fifty years. Hawes tells us he found thirteen in this class, and fifty-one others, one of them a woman, with sentences of from thirty to forty years, and 240 with from twenty to thirty years of unexpired sentences. He also found a couple of offenders chained to wheelbarrows, and the number had been much larger not long before.