In this place we met another comrade on his way from Kara, going off to be interned elsewhere. This was Steblin-Kamensky,[72] whom his wife voluntarily accompanied. They had been too late for the steamer, and were now obliged to wait in Verkhny-Udinsk till the way again became open—three or four months probably. During that time he was at liberty to go about in the place as he pleased, and naturally we spent together the two days of our sojourn here, Kamensky telling us all he could of life in Kara. He was a brilliant talker, and described with an inexhaustible flow of humour the doings of our comrades in every particular. True, our laughter over his stories was mingled with much sorrow and indignation, for what he related was often sad enough. He told us of the bitter hardships inflicted on our comrades by an inhuman gaoler, and he described Captain Nikolin, in command over the penal settlement for “politicals” at Kara, as a malicious, ill-natured man, continually devising petty humiliations for the prisoners. Footnote 72: In 1879 he had been condemned, at the same time as Maria Kovalèvskaya, to ten years’ “katorga,” for armed resistance to the police. He afterwards committed suicide in Irkutsk. These various comrades, from whose personal knowledges we had information about Kara, all made the same impression upon us. They bore the stamp of their long imprisonment; their voices were muffled in tone; anxiety, deep and constant, was painted on their faces; the hair of nearly all, despite their youth—hardly any had reached thirty—was prematurely grey. But discouraged and broken-spirited they were _not_; or at least with one or two exceptions only. Very few of them could regard the future with any hopeful feelings for themselves personally. Long years of exile lay before them, doomed as they were to vegetate in some forsaken corner of Siberia, victims to all sorts of hardships, far from friends and civilisation. To many it seemed questionable whether their future lot might not be more dreary than prison life itself. Yet even the semblance of freedom attracted them—a doubtful freedom certainly, for the exiles, or “colonists” as they are called, are subject to a thousand and one restrictions at every turn. I met one only who looked forward with a steadfast confidence in the bright side of things, and this notwithstanding the fact that he was bound for the worst part of Siberia—the government of Yakutsk. Ivan Kashintsev[73] was then only twenty-five, and full of youth and high spirits; he declared to me, on the occasion of our meeting at one of the halting-stations (we already knew each other), that he meant to escape at all hazards. This, in fact, he accomplished later, and he is now living abroad. Footnote 73: He was sentenced to ten years’ “katorga” in 1881 for taking part in the South Russian Workmen’s Union, and in consequence of the Coronation manifesto a third of this sentence was remitted.