The first matter I inquired about particularly was the prevalence of disease in the villages to which exiles are assigned. I was already satisfied in regard to the inevitableness of starvation. A report from a certain village five hundred versts from Tobolsk had recently reached Russia, asserting that the number of houses in the village which were infected with a certain loathsome disease was so great that the exiles could not escape close daily contact with it. This was an Ostiak village, and the disease had evidently been rooted there many years, for the report stated that the noses and lips of many of the inhabitants were entirely eaten away. I had already seen some dreadful cases, so I was not unprepared to learn that this report, which was signed by fifty political exiles, was not exaggerated. One of the group round our friendly samovar was an exile from the village of Felinsky. He told me that a careful investigation had just been made, and of the fifty houses composing Felinsky village, forty-eight were infected with this disease. And yet twelve politicals were assigned to this village. A government physician stated that in his district--Ovat Point--there were eighty-two villages, and over sixty per cent. of all the houses in all of the villages were similarly infected. There is another very common disease found in these northern villages. It is a stomach ailment which poisons the blood. It results from eating bad fish. The query naturally presents itself: why do people eat fish that have gone bad? The explanation is plausible: the northern summers are short and the winters excessively long. The winters are also exceedingly severe, and during weeks at a time the people may not stir out of doors. It is necessary, therefore, for them to lay by what stores they can during the summer against the winter, when they may not shoot or trap. So the fish caught during the warm season are preserved according to a simple and crude method. They are partially sun-dried, then roughly salted. The sun-baking decays them slightly and the salt preserves them in practically that condition. Ordinarily, dried fish are preserved with a specially prepared salt, often containing a dash of sulphur, which prevents this slight decay. But these crudely prepared and partly decayed fish are said to be not untasty once one is accustomed to the diet, only the ultimate effects are disastrous. However, it is the best the people can do, and so they depend largely on these fish during the winter. Scurvy is very common throughout the region, of course. The scurvy, in advanced forms, is one of the most nauseating of human diseases to look upon, but throughout Siberia, as throughout the famine region, there is no escaping it.