The impossibility of living on seventy-five cents a month, the current allowance, is patent on the face of it. Living is very high in Siberia. All foods are costly. For example, the government allowance of bread for soldiers is thirty pounds a month. Now thirty pounds of bread cost ninety cents! Sugar--criminally high all over Russia--is twelve cents a pound in Siberia. Ordinary meat is practically unobtainable at any price in the remoter places. All vegetables, save potatoes, are unknown. The character of the soil, in the northern provinces, is such that no vegetables will grow. Potatoes, being scarce, are thirty cents a pail. I do not wish to sustain the popular impression that Siberia lies entirely within the region of Arctic cold and barrenness, for it reaches as far south as the latitude of central and southern Italy, Greece, and Constantinople, but political exiles at the time of my visit to Siberia were being sent rather to the northern and desolate parts of Tobolsk province, to Yakutsk, and the Transbaikal region. Space forbids that I recount the vivid hours spent in Tyumen, of interesting conversations I enjoyed with cultivated men and women who had been sent off to this distant Asiatic province to end their efforts to do something worth while for their long-suffering fellow countrymen. After three days I started for Tobolsk, the capital of this western province, where I anticipated planning a tour of a few hundred miles to outlying settlements used for penal colonization.