* * * * * Before those who were released from prison, to live in exile under police supervision, reached their appointed destinations, they had at that time many difficulties and delays to encounter. We ourselves went at a snail’s pace on our way to Kara, but prisoners coming thence progressed far more slowly. They had to wait at nearly every halting-station until some convoy on the homeward journey could pick them up and take them on for a certain part of the way, and sometimes they were kept in this manner nearly a week at a station. On an average they barely made five versts a day, and when the distance they had to travel was some hundreds or even thousands of versts, the journey might take months to perform. At each meeting with comrades on the return journey from Kara, I could not help thinking of my own future, and saying to myself, “What will you feel like when after long years you tread this path again? Or, indeed, will you ever tread it?” * * * * * One day I found I had sustained an odd loss: someone had made off with a bag in which I kept some of my belongings, the chief item among them being my fetters! I had to make the somewhat curious confession to the commanding officer that, instead of wearing my chains, I had allowed them to be stolen; and I was rather surprised that, while commiserating me on account of my personal losses, he did not seem at all agitated about the loss of the Government’s property. “What am I to do without my fetters?” I asked him, when I saw that the absence of this important detail in the attire of a convict left him unmoved. “Well, of course we must get some for you somehow,” opined the officer. “Just wait a moment; there ought to be things of the kind lying about somewhere.” And he gave the sergeant orders to look in the lumber-room, where a new pair of fetters was discovered. “Take care you don’t lose these!” said the officer, as I packed them among my luggage. This is a specimen of the indulgent, almost fatherly demeanour which our guardians more and more assumed towards us as we got further east. We were by this time in the thick of the Siberian winter and its severities. We had passed the Yablonovoi mountain ridges, and were nearing Tchita, the capital of Transbaikalia. At the last station before our arrival there we observed a great bustle going on among the ordinary prisoners; the sergeant and the soldiers were occupied with them all night, continually going in and out in a quite unusual manner. We racked our brains to imagine what could be on foot; but the riddle was only solved next day, as will be seen further.