pirator,' and sentenced to five years' hard labour, and
then exile for life, as 'politicals,' which, as you no doubt know,
meant that, if they survived the first part of their sentence, they
would be allowed to settle in an allotted part of Southern Siberia,
free in everything but permission to leave the country.

"Were I to talk till this time to-morrow I could not properly
describe to you all the horrors of that awful journey along the Great
Siberian road, from the Pillar of Farewells that marks the boundary
between Europe and Asia across the frightful snowy wastes to Kara.

"The hideous story has been told again and again without avail to the
Christian nations of Europe, and they have permitted that awful crime
against humanity to be committed year after year without even a
protest, in obedience to the miserable principles that bade them to
place policy before religion and the etiquette of nations before the
everlasting laws of God.

"After two years of heartbreaking toil at the mines my health utterly
broke down. One day I fell fainting under the lash of the brutal
overseer, and as I lay on the ground he ran at me and kicked me twice
with his heavy iron-shod boots, once on the hip, breaking the bone,
and once on the lower part of the spine, crushing the spinal cord,
and paralysing my lower limbs for ever.

"As this did not rouse me from my fainting-fit, the heartless fiend
snatched a torch from the wall of the mine-gallery and thrust the
burning end in my long thick beard, setting it on fire and scorching
my flesh horribly, as you can see. I was carried out of the mine and
taken to the convict hospital, where I lay for weeks between life and
death, and only lived instead of died because of the quenchless
spirit that was within me crying out for vengeance on my tormentors.

"When I came back to consciousness, the first thing I learnt was that
I was free to return to England on condition that I did not stop on
my way through Russia.

"My friends, urged on by the tireless energy of my wife's anxious
love, had at last found out what had befallen me, and proceedings had
been instituted to establish the innocence that had been betrayed by
a common and too well-known device used by the Russian police to
secure the conviction and removal of those who have become obnoxious
to the bureaucracy.

"Whether my friends would ever have accomplished this of themselves
is doubtful, but suddenly the evidence of a pope of the O