that her mother had come and had given a
message of greeting. That was all she was allowed to learn. Locked
up without occupation within the walls of a prison!... Everything
human concentrated in the single person of the turnkey who brings
the food!... The monotonousness only broken, now and then, by the
call of the sentinel, who, peering through the window bars,
asks,--'Prisoner, have you not done any harm to yourself?' or by
the rattling of the locks and door-bolts, the clack of guns
shouldered or grounded, or the dreary striking of the hour in the
fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul.... Far, far away from
everything human!... Nothing there to nourish the feelings of
friendship and love; nothing but the sympathy created by the
knowledge that, to the right and to the left, there are
fellow-sufferers passing their wretched days in the same way....
Thus it was that, in the depth of her solitude, there arose, in
Vjera Sassulitch, such warm-hearted sympathy for every State
prisoner that every political convict sufferer became for her a
spiritual comrade in her recollections, to whom she assigned a
place in the experience and the impressions of her past life."

During the two years that Vjera was kept in dungeons under a mere
suspicion, she was twice only subjected to a secret inquiry--"judicial,"
if that is a word applicable to these dread Inquisition procedures. At
last she feared she was forgotten. Nothing whatever having come out
against her, she was finally set free, and went back to her heart-broken
mother, only to be suddenly re-arrested ten days afterwards! For a
moment, in spite of a two years' bitter experience, she childishly
thought there was some mistake. But the horrible truth of her situation
soon broke upon her. One morning she was seized in prison, and, without
being allowed to take even a change of dress, or a mantle, transported
by gendarmes to a distant province by way of banishment. One of these
gendarmes threw his own fur over her shivering shoulders, or else she
might have perished on the road.

I will not go here through the whole "infernal circle" of her sufferings
and involuntary migrations, which I have elsewhere described more fully.
I will not relate how she was "moved on" from one place to the other;
the only variety in her treatment consisting of an occasional return to
prison. Eleven years had thus alto