“But the government does provide physicians,” was the officer’s reply. The physician then asked me to wait until others of the exiles came in, when the Berezov man reported that the single Berezov doctor, for example, has a territory almost as large as the whole of France! Others told me that in the central and southern sections of Tobolsk province physicians have districts which are defined as “a radius of five hundred versts of a given point.” In winter the only means of communication is by sledge. Fancy a New York physician who had one patient in Atlantic City, another in Lenox, and a third in Utica, and no other way of getting from point to point than by horse; or a Boston practitioner with a call to make in Pawtucket, and a patient to be operated upon in Bangor! A delegate from a village called Felinsky gave me a photograph of the funeral of a political exile who died through the sheerest, most wanton, neglect. He had a bad tooth which developed an abscess. There was no one about who knew how to lance it, or that it should be lanced, and blood poisoning set in, causing his death. [Illustration: Siberia: the start into the Interior Politicals are corralled like so many cattle and marched to their respective destinations, which may be one thousand, fifteen hundred, or two thousand miles from Tyumen, the starting-point] One by one the exiles began to gather. To me it was a remarkable group. There was a civil engineer who had formerly been the district manager of one of the Baltic provinces railroads--now exiled to the far north. Then there was a mining engineer from Great Russia, the physician from Perm in the Urals, a Jewish student from Odessa, a peasant from Saratoff--who still bore the fresh bruises and mutilations of the police who tortured him--a Harkoff editor, a St. Petersburg school-teacher, and an “intellectual peasant” from Moscow province. This man, a follower of Robert Owen, could not get over his surprise at being greeted by a correspondent in Siberia. “When we fought on the barricades in Moscow,” he said, “correspondents came to see us. When we had our Peasants’ Union congress in Moscow, correspondents were there. And now in Siberia a correspondent visits us!” He shook his head in deep wonderment. Later, he showed me a Russian-English book which he had procured somehow, somewhere, and from which he hoped to learn English during the years of his exile. Around a steaming samovar we sat until far into the night--that little group and I--they relating to me the stories of their lives, the conditions of their exiles, and I telling them of what the world is doing, the world of which they once were a part, but which now seems remote as another planet, this world which they have lost. Some of them spoke English, nearly all of them knew French or German. They were strong men, all. Men of great hopes, of nobler thought and life than banishment and suffering can destroy.