e. I might be sent from one government prison to another,
from Tobolsk to the eastern sea; therefore every place possessed an
interest for me. Besides this, although I was not actually a political
prisoner myself I was virtually so, and my sympathies were wholly with
the prisoners, and I thought that I might possibly be able to advise and
counsel men who came under my charge: to describe to them the places
where they might have relations or friends shut up, and to dissuade
those who, like yourself, meditated escape, for my studies had not gone
far before I became convinced that this was well-nigh hopeless. I
learned how strict were the regulations on the frontier, how impossible,
even if this were reached, to journey on without being arrested at the
very first village that a fugitive entered, and that so strict were they
that although numbers of the convict establishments were within
comparatively short distances of the frontier, escapes were no more
frequent from them than from those three thousand miles to the east.
When I say escapes I mean escapes from Siberia. Escapes from the prisons
are of constant occurrence, since most of the work is done outside the
walls. There are thousands, I might almost say tens of thousands, get
away every spring, but they all have to come back again in winter. The
authorities trouble themselves little about them, for they know that
they must give themselves up in a few months."

"Yes, my guard told me about that. He said they were not punished much
when they came in."

"Sometimes they are flogged; but the Russian peasant is accustomed to
flogging and thinks but little of it. More often they are not flogged.
They have, perhaps, a heavier chain, for the convicts all wear
chains--we have an advantage over them there--and they are put on poorer
diet for a time. They lose the remission of sentence they would obtain
by good behaviour, that is all, even when they are recognized, but as a
rule they take care not to give themselves up at the prison they left,
but at one many hundred miles from it. In the course of the summer their
hair has grown again. They assert stoutly that they are free labourers
who have lost their papers, and who cannot earn their living through the
winter. The authorities know, of course, that they are escaped convicts,
but they have no means of identifying them. They cannot send them the
rounds of a hundred convict establishments; so instead of a man being
entered as Al