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SIBERIA

forced colonization in the Trans-Baikál village of Barguzín — and after serving out her second penal term had again been sent as a forced colonist to this wretched, God-forsaken Buriát settlement of Selengínsk, where she was under the direct supervision and control of the interesting chief of police who on the occasion of our first visit accompanied us to the Buddhist lamasery of Goose Lake. There was not another educated woman, so far as I know, within a hundred miles in any direction; she received from the Government an allowance of a dollar and a quarter a week for her support; her correspondence was under police control; she was separated for life from her family and friends; and she had, it seemed to me, absolutely nothing to look forward to except a few years, more or less, of hardship and privation, and at last burial in a lonely graveyard beside the Selengá River, where no sympathetic eye might ever rest upon the unpainted wooden cross that would briefly chronicle her life and death. The unshaken courage with which this unfortunate woman contemplated her dreary future, and the faith that she manifested in the ultimate triumph of liberty in her native country, were as touching as they were heroic. Almost the last words that she said to me were: "Mr. Kennan, we may die in exile, and our children may die in exile, and our children's children may die in exile, but something will come of it at last." I have never seen nor heard of Madame Breshkófskaya since that day. She has passed as completely out of my life as if she had died when I bade her good-by; but I cannot recall her last words to me without feeling conscious that all my standards of courage, of fortitude, and of heroic self-sacrifice have been raised for all time, and raised by the hand of a woman. Interviews with such political exiles — and I met many in the Trans-Baikál — were to me a more bracing tonic than medicine. I might be sick and weak, I might feel that we were having a hard life, but such examples of suffering nobly borne for the sake of a