with these exiles—all meeting upon the common footing of personal character, and ignoring, for the time, the peculiar network of interrelations that united them. Whether or not Vice-governor Petukhóf reported to the Minister of the Interior that we had made the acquaintance of the political criminals in Tomsk, I do not know—probably not. He seemed to me to be a faithful officer of the Crown, but, at the same time, a man of culture, ability, and good sense; and while he doubtless disapproved of the revolutionary movement, he recognized the fact that among the banished revolutionists were men of education, refinement, and high personal character, who might, naturally enough, attract the attention of foreign travelers.
The number of politicals in Tomsk, at the time of our visit, was about thirty, including six or eight women. Some of them were administrative exiles, who had only just arrived from European Russia; some were poseléntsi, or forced colonists, who had been banished originally to "the most remote part" of Siberia, but who had finally been allowed to return in broken health to a "less remote part"; while a few were survivors of the famous "193," who had languished for years in the casemates of the Petropávlovsk fortress, and had then been sent to the plains of Western Siberia.
I was struck by the composure with which these exiles would sometimes talk of intolerable injustice and frightful sufferings. The men and women who had been sent to the province of Yakútsk for refusing to take the oath of allegiance to Alexander III., and who had suffered in that arctic wilderness all that human beings can suffer from hunger, cold, sickness, and bereavement, did not seem to be conscious that there was anything very extraordinary in their experience. Now and then some man whose wife had committed suicide in exile would flush a little and clinch his hands as he spoke of her; or some broken-hearted woman whose baby had frozen to death in her arms on the road
