It was the more bitter that our first joy over release from prison had soon worn off, and life in the settlement had now become almost as irksome as the life in prison had been. Our days seemed as monotonous and empty as ever; and while in prison one had been constrained to accept the unalleviated barrenness of life, here in the settlement one felt the tug of the chain at every turn, and chafed at it. There we had known from the first that all reasonable and profitable activity was denied us, that we were condemned to an uninteresting and aimless existence; and under such conditions one’s mental alertness becomes dulled—almost atrophied. In the settlement, on the contrary, it was quite otherwise; here we were in the midst of life again, the state of lethargy that had reigned in the prison passed away; and although the pulse of life could hardly be said to beat high, yet we could see people exerting themselves, undertaking enterprises, pursuing their various interests, fighting with difficulties and dangers. We ourselves the while were restricted to the work of our narrow household economy; work which naturally could not satisfy our aspirations. Most of us yearned to set our powers to work—to do something that should call forth all our energies and capabilities, not merely to chop wood and make hay. But in this forsaken spot, and hemmed in as we were by all manner of restrictions, we could find no congenial outlet for our activities. To all appearance we were now at liberty to undertake many things that had been forbidden in prison; but this appearance was mainly illusory. It was just this contradiction between our apparent rights and our actual possibilities that galled us and weighed heavy on our spirits, making us sometimes inclined to think we would almost rather return to prison, if thereby we might escape from this torment of inactivity. We found it irksome in the extreme to have to take enormous pains and waste much time over mere trifles—the details of our primitive household management—which, under the difficult conditions of our life, made exorbitant demands upon us. Especially at first, when we were new to it all, it often happened that for weeks at a time one could never take up a book or a newspaper, and for educated, intellectual men that was naturally very wearisome. The only interesting mental occupation open to us was to observe the lives of the dwellers in this strange place; as already mentioned, they were an oddly mixed lot, and we had plenty of opportunity for studying them. [Illustration: FEMALE CRIMINALS AT KARA DRAWING WATER-CART To face page 310 ]