One of my fellow-countrymen, Wysoçki, was head clerk in the counting-house of the distillery; but my great ally there was the young Russian, Stépan Bazanov, manager of the factory for the lessees, whose relative he was. He was a lad of twenty or upwards, brave and upright, whose only weakness was the most naïve adoration for the Emperor Nicholas. He never would or could admit that Nicholas did wrong; all the wrong, according to him, was owing to the Boyards, and he declared that, were it not for the intervention of the nobility, the Tzar would make his people the happiest in the world; and I am bound to say that, as far as my experience has gone, this opinion is a pretty general one in Russia, among the people, though not among the ‘staroviertsi.’ What most disposed me to like Bazanov was that he confided his love griefs to me. The poor boy, who was lamentably uneducated in every way, had fallen violently in love with a cousin of his own; but the Orlovs put difficulties in the way of the union which he so much desired. Fancy hearing a lover’s confidences in an accursed place like this where convicts worked! though to be sure the man who made them to me knew that he was free, and that he did not awake every morning to fear the stick and the rods! I must say that the thought of being exposed at any moment, for any trivial cause, and at the beck of any official, to treatment as shameful as it is terrible, created in me a gloomy and fierce temper, and that, in spite of the relative and very appreciable improvement in my case, I was kept in a state of continual tension. I could not forget the subject, there was no way of doing so; the punishments daily inflicted on some one or other of the convicts, all my own equals in the social hierarchy of the place, sent up a cry of _cras tibi_, enough to drive anyone mad with despair. Moreover, the familiarities to which the superiors often admit their deported labourers have a dangerous side. There is no real trust to be placed in the caprices of a man invested with arbitrary powers. His favours are likely to be capricious also, for these men are generally of low minds and manners; and it amuses them to make a sport of their fellow-creatures, raising them one day only in order to humiliate them more deeply hereafter. This is a snare into which many Poles, who like myself have been carried to Siberia, are apt to fall; into which indeed they have fallen. Their education, their manners, the noble nature of their misfortunes, all attract to them a certain consideration, and sometimes even win for them the good graces of their masters. Thus they rise above the level of the common herd of the lost, and they beguile themselves with the illusion that in this way they are reintegrated into society. But the moment of awakening from this dream soon comes, and the deported man, rudely reminded of his real state, may be called happy if he is reminded of it only by word of mouth! Some years before my arrival at