search for gold, and it suggested a worked-out placer in the most dreary and desolate part of the Black Hills.
We reached the settlement at the Lower Diggings just before dark. It proved to be a spacious but straggling Siberian village of low whitewashed cabins, long unpainted log barracks, officers' tin-roofed residences, with wattle-inclosed yards, and a black, gloomy, weather-beaten log prison of the usual East-Siberian type. The buildings belonging to the Government were set with some show of regularity in wide open spaces or along a few very broad streets; and they gave to the central part of the village a formal and official air that was strangely at variance with the disorderly arrangement of the unpainted shanties and dilapidated driftwood cabins of the ticket-of-leave convicts which were huddled together, here and there, on the outskirts of the settlement or along the road that led to Ust Kará. On one side of an open square, around which stood the prison and the barracks, forty or fifty convicts in long gray overcoats with yellow diamonds on their backs were at work upon a new log building, surrounded by a cordon of Cossacks in sheep-skin shúbas, felt boots, and muff-shaped fur caps, who stood motionless at their posts, leaning upon their Berdan rifles and watching the prisoners. At a little distance was burning a camp-fire, over which was hanging a tea-kettle, and around which were standing or crouching a dozen more Cossacks, whose careless attitudes and stacked rifles showed that they were temporarily off duty. In the waning light of the cold, gloomy autumnal afternoon, the dreary snowy square, the gray group of convicts working listlessly as if hopeless or exhausted, and the cordon of Cossacks leaning upon their bayoneted rifles made up a picture that for some reason exerted upon me a chilling and depressing influence. It was our first glimpse of convict life at the mines.
We drove at once to the house of the governor of the prisons, for the purpose of inquiring where we could find shelter for the night. Major Pótulof, a tall, fine-looking,
