Marshal Münich, the favorite of the Empress Anna, was doomed, in his sixtieth year, to a Siberian exile, when Elizabeth ascended the throne. His prison consisted of three rooms--one for his guards or jailers, the second for their kitchen, the third for his own use. A wall twenty feet high prevented him from enjoying the view even of the sky. The man who had once governed Russia had but half a rouble daily to spend; but the love of his wife--who, although fifty-five years old, had the courage and the self-denial to accompany him in his banishment--alleviated the sorrows of his exile. The venerable couple spent twenty-one years in Siberia, and on their return from exile, fifty-two children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, were assembled to meet them at Moscow. The revolution which placed Catherine the Second on the throne had nearly once more doomed the octogenarian statesman to banishment, but he fortunately weathered the storm, and died as governor of St. Petersburg. In this century, also, many an unfortunate exile, guiltless at least of ignoble crimes, has been doomed to wander to Siberia. There many a soldier of the _grande armée_ has ended his life; there still lives many a patriotic Pole, banished for having loved his country “not wisely but too well;” there also the conspirators who marked with so bloody an episode the accession of Nicholas, have had time to reflect on the dangers of plotting against the Czar. Most of the Siberian exiles are, however, common criminals--such as in our country would be hung or transported, or sentenced to the treadmill: the assassin, the robber--to Siberia; the smuggler on the frontier, whose free-trade principles injure the imperial exchequer--to Siberia; even the vagabond who is caught roaming, and can give no satisfactory account of his doings and intentions, receives a fresh passport--to Siberia. Thus the annual number of the exiles amounts to about 12,000, who, according to the gravity of their offenses, are sent farther and farther eastward. On an average, every week sees a transport of about 300 of these “unfortunates,” as they are termed by popular compassion, pass through Tobolsk. About one-sixth are immediately pardoned, and the others sorted. Murderers and burglars are sent to the mines of Nertschinsk, after having been treated in Russia, before they set out on their travels, with fifty lashes of the knout. In former times their nostrils used to be torn off, a barbarity which is now no longer practised.