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SIBERIA

delighted with her; she is so original and affectionate, and she has had so much tragedy in her short life, which she speaks of now and then as if horrors were a natural part of existence to her. She was brought through Siberia and Russia disguised as a boy. We hope to wean her thoughts from these terrible subjects and give her something of the ordinary joys of girlhood. But her destiny must be a sad one, for she will surely [and quite rightly] throw in her lot with the revolutionists of Russia, and unless the revolution comes soon our little Véra will spend much of her life in prison and in exile. She was showing Annie how the orthodox Russians hold their thumbs and two fingers pressed together to represent the Trinity during their worship, and then she said, 'But God does n't mind how we hold our fingers, does he?' She was moaning in her sleep one night, and when Daisy woke her she said, 'I dreamed there were spies in the room, and I pretended to be asleep till they went to sleep, and then I got up and crept to the cot where my baby brother was. I said, "Hush! don't make a noise, for there are spies in the room," and I took him up and went to the door watching the spies all the time, and I opened the door and there were some men hung up, and my father's head lay on the ground and his body was a little way off covered with a white cloth.' Think of that for the dream of a child of ten years, and think how countless are the sorrows and wrongs inflicted by the Czar of Russia and his Government! And they say he is a humane, Christian man. Alas! what horrible things are said to be Christian."

Mr. Volkhófski is now editing in London the newspaper Free Russia, the organ of the English society known as "The Friends of Russian Freedom."

The extension of our acquaintance in Tomsk, on one side with Government officials, and on the other with political exiles, led now and then to peculiar and embarrassing situations. A day or two before our departure for Irkútsk,