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SIBERIA

administrative process to a village called Barguzín in the territory of the Trans-Baikál, more than four thousand miles east of St. Petersburg. In the summer of 1881 he, with three other politicals, including Madame Breshkófskaya, made an unsuccessful attempt to escape across the Trans-Baikál to the Pacific Ocean with the hope of there getting on board an American vessel. For this he was sent to a native ulús in the sub-arctic province of Yakútsk, where he was seen by some or all of the members of the American expedition sent to the relief of the survivors of the arctic exploring steamer Jeannette. In 1882 or 1883 he was transferred to Selengínsk, and in the autumn of 1884 his term of exile expired, leaving him in an East-Siberian village three thousand miles from home without any means of getting back. The Government does not return to their homes the political exiles whom it has sent to Siberia, unless such exiles are willing to travel by étape, with a returning criminal party. Owing to the fact that parties going towards Russia do not make as close connections with the armed convoys at the étapes as do parties coming away from Russia, their progress is very slow. Colonel Zagárin, the inspector of exile transportation for Eastern Siberia, told me that returning parties are about three hundred days in making the thousand-mile stretch between Irkútsk and Tomsk. Very few political exiles are willing to live a year in fever-infected and vermin-infested étapes even for the sake of getting back to European Russia; and unless they can earn money enough to defray the expenses of such a journey, or have relatives who are able to send them the necessary money, they remain in Siberia. I helped one such political to get home by buying, for a hundred rúbles, a collection of Siberian flowers that he had made, and I should have been glad to help Mr. Shamárin; but he had been at work for more than a year upon an index to the public documents in the archives of the old town of Selengínsk, extending over a period of a hundred and thirty years, and he hoped that the