a court-yard formed by a high stockade of closely set and sharpened logs. It did not differ much in external appearance from the men's barracks inside the prison-wall, which we had already examined. The kámeras varied in size from 10 feet by 12 to 30 feet by 45, and contained from three to forty women each. They were all clean and well lighted, the floors and sleeping-platforms had been scrubbed to a snowy whiteness, strips of coarse carpet had been laid down here and there in the gangways between the nári, and one cell even had potted plants in the window. The women, like the men, were obliged to sleep in rows on the hard platforms without pillows or blankets, but their cells were not so overcrowded as were those of the men, and the air was infinitely purer. Most of the women seemed to belong to the peasant class; many of them were accompanied by children, and I saw very few hard or vicious faces.
From the women's prison we went to the prison for exiled families, another stockaded log barrack about 75 feet in length which had no cell partitions and which contained nearly 300 men, women, and children. Here again the sleeping-platforms were overcrowded; the air was heavy and foul; dozens of children were crying from hunger or wretchedness; and the men and women looked tired, sleepless, and dejected. None of the women in this barrack were criminals. All were voluntarily going into banishment with their criminal husbands, and most of them were destined for points in Western Siberia.
About one o'clock in the afternoon, after having made as thorough an examination as possible of all the prison buildings, Mr. Frost and I went with Mr. Ignátof to lunch. Knowing that our host was the contractor for the transportation of exiles eastward by barge, and that he had been a prominent member of the Tiumén prison committee, I asked him if the Government in St. Petersburg was aware of the condition of the Tiumén forwarding prison,
