Some of us were witnesses that day of a strange scene, which could be followed by looking through the crevices in the stockade surrounding our yard. A carriage brought a young lady, attended by two gendarmes, to the commandant’s house; she entered, and shortly after the commandant, in a state of great excitement, jumped out of the window into the yard bareheaded, and ran away. The young lady soon appeared in front of the house, and spoke with evident earnestness and decision to the gendarmes; after which she began talking quietly with a warder’s children, and caressing them. All this seemed most enigmatical; we gathered little save that the young lady had insisted on having a telegram despatched. But the solution soon followed. We learned that when Sigida came face to face with the commandant she struck him a blow, saying, “That is for you as commandant!” and our hero, despite the presence of the gendarmes, took to his heels and fled, leaping out of the window as we had seen. Sigida, afraid that Masyukov would try to hush up the affair, had thereupon demanded that the occurrence should be telegraphed at once to the proper authorities. She was counting on the usual procedure in such a case; an officer receiving a personal injury from one of his charges being generally removed from the place where such a thing had happened, and the offender sentenced to death. Her calculations as to these probable results of her action proved false, however; the poor lady had offered her sacrifice in vain. I must here pause to speak of other events, which, though not directly bearing on these struggles at Kara, yet greatly influenced the minds of those concerned in them. The year of which I speak, 1889, will never be forgotten by those who were then in Siberia. The news of the sanguinary scenes that took place in Yakutsk was told to the whole civilised world, and everywhere aroused horror at the cruelty of the Tsar’s Government; yet probably but few of my readers will recollect the particulars. There were at that time interned in Yakutsk some young men and girls who were to be deported still further northward, “by administrative methods,” to those wretched forlorn hamlets that figure on the map of Siberia as Verkhny-Kolymsk, Nijni-Kolymsk, Verchoyansk, and so on. Among these young people, who of course belonged to the student class, there were boys and girls under age, to whose charge even Russian law could lay no crime.