The old prison at Omsk was situated at the end of the citadel just under the ramparts. It was surrounded by a high palisade of stakes buried deep in the ground, enclosing a court-yard two hundred feet long by one hundred and fifty feet broad. A great gate in the stockade guarded by sentries gave admission to the prison. Looking through the interstices of the palisades from within, a narrow glimpse was obtained of the glacis of the fort sloping downward, and of a little corner of the sky above. The prison buildings consisted of a number of log huts of one story, each providing a separate barrack to accommodate roughly about two hundred convicts herded together in very close association. This was long before the extension of the cellular system to Russia, and the terrors of isolated confinement did not exist in those days. But life in common had its peculiar horrors, which our author enlarges upon. “I could not,” he says, “possibly have conjured up the poignant and terrible suffering of never being alone, even for one minute, during ten years. Working always under surveillance in the barracks, ever in the unvarying companionship of two hundred others; never alone, never! This enforced cohabitation was the sharpest and most painful sensation endured. Nowhere is it so horrible as in a prison, where the society must contain many with whom no one would willingly live. “Among them were murderers by imprudence and murderers by profession, simple thieves and chiefs of thieves, masters in the art of finding money in the pockets of a passer-by or of lifting anything, no matter what, from the table.... The majority were depraved and perverted, so that calumnies and scandal rained among them like hail. Our life was a constant hell, a perpetual damnation.... Those who were not already corrupt on reception soon became so. Intrigues, calumnies, scandalous backbiting of all kinds, envy and hatred reigned above everything else. No ordinary tongue could hold its own against these adepts at abuse with insults constantly in their mouths.” A curious trait in this heterogeneous assembly, in which the elements of evil predominated, was the reticence of the convicts. Some were malefactors of the worst kind, veterans in habitual crime, guilty of the most atrocious misdeeds, but they would not talk of them. On one occasion in the barrack room a miscreant who had killed and cut up a child of five began to relate the horrible details; how he had tempted the little one with a toy, inveigled it into a private place, and there used his murderous knife. He was one of the licensed buffoons of the establishment, who as a rule found a ready audience, but he was now received with one unanimous cry of indignant disgust; and he was shamed into silence. It was contrary to the unwritten law of the prison to speak of such things.