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SIBERIA

personal experience that seemed to be made for the purpose of exciting our sympathy. If they suffered, they bore their suffering with dignity and self-control. All of them seemed to be physically well except Mrs. Karélin, who looked thin, pale, and careworn, and Mr. Vítort, who had been three times in exile and ten years in prison or in Siberia, and who, I thought, would not live much longer to trouble the Government that had wrecked his life. Although only forty-five years of age, he seemed greatly broken, walked feebly with a cane, and suffered constantly from rheumatism contracted in damp prison cells. He was one of the best-informed exiles that I met in Western Siberia, and was the first to tell me of the death of General Grant. We had a long talk about the United States, in the course of which he asked many questions concerning our civil war, the constitutional amendments adopted after the war, the balance of parties in Congress, and the civil service reform policy of President Cleveland, which showed that he had more than a superficial acquaintance with our political history. In the houses of all the exiles in Ulbínsk, no matter how wretchedly they might be furnished, I found a writing-desk or table, books, and such magazines as the Revue des Deux Mondes, and the Rússki Véistnik, or Russian Messenger. In the house of Mr. Blok there was a small but well-selected library, in which I noticed, in addition to Russian books, a copy of Longfellow's poems, in English; Maine's "Ancient Law," and "Village Communities"; Bain's "Logic"; Mill's "Political Economy"; Lecky's "History of Rationalism" (an expurgated Russian edition); Spencer's "Essays: Moral, Political, and Esthetic," and his "Principles of Sociology"; Taine's "History of English Literature"; Laboulaye's "History of the United States," and a large number of French and German works on jurisprudence and political economy. I need hardly call attention, I think, to the fact that men who read and carry to Siberia with them such books as these are not wild fanatics,