Among my recollections of the year 1889, one pleasant memory remains to me—how we commemorated the hundredth anniversary of the storming of the Bastille. While the French nation, amid fervent rejoicings, celebrated the centenary of their great Revolution, a handful of convicts, imprisoned by the Russian despot in a barren wilderness of the Far East, took their share in the festival. Ours was truly but a modest ceremonial—no banquet, no toasts, no speeches. Tea and a cake provided at the common expense were all that we could afford; and our banqueting hall was the prison-yard, whither all the tables from our cells were carried for a public feast. There we sat, and thought of the great triumph of the Revolution, and of its heroes—the spiritual heroes of the civilised world. “Will the day ever come when the people will demolish our Bastilles—the Fortress of Peter and Paul, Schlüsselburg, the Citadel of Warsaw, and all the other gaols in which Tsarism imprisons its foes?” we asked ourselves; “and will any of us be still alive then?” “The battle for freedom will have been fought and won by the beginning of the twentieth century,” our optimists averred. “Who knows if it will ever take place?” said the sceptics. The subject was argued over and discussed up and down. Many who then were full of hope now rest in their graves; others languish to this day in Siberian deserts. I return to the sorrowful events that were then happening in Kara. After Sigida’s assault upon the commandant the women began their hunger-strike, their third and most terrible. They adhered resolutely to their decision; Masyukov must go, if it cost them their lives. For sixteen days they abstained from food. Sigida, it was asserted, remained fasting for twenty-two days, and when the prison doctor reported that he could not answer for her life, the Governor sent an order that she was to be fed artificially. Whether the doctor carried out that instruction I do not know. A rumour came to us during those dreadful days that he had had a scene with Maria Kovalèvskaya: he went—it was said—into her cell one day, when she was lying on her bed, exhausted by hunger; and she, supposing he had come to administer nourishment to her forcibly, struck him in the face. The doctor, a rather humane kind of man, seems to have looked on this simply as the act of an invalid not properly responsible for her actions; he told her she was doing him an injustice,—that he was not going to touch her,—whereupon she begged his pardon. He said to his friends afterwards that he had never seen a woman with such strength of character, so spirited and eloquent as she.