eager questions of the convicts with regard to the progress of the Russian revolutionary movement. In the course of the talk my attention was accidentally attracted to a person whom I had not particularly noticed before and to whom I had not been introduced. It was a man thirty or thirty-five years of age, with a colorless, strangely vacant face and large, protruding blue eyes. He had seated himself on a low wooden stool directly in front of me, had rested his elbows on his knees with his chin in his open hands, and was staring up at me with a steady and at the same time expressionless gaze in which there seemed to be something unnatural and uncanny. At the first pause in the conversation he said to me abruptly, but in a strange, drawling, monotonous tone, "We — have — a — graveyard — of — our — own — here. — Would — you — like — to — see — it?"
I was so surprised and startled by his manner and by the nature of his question that I did not for a moment reply; but the conviction suddenly flashed upon me that it was a political convict who had lost his reason. As the knocking at the gate after the murder in Macbeth seemed to De Quincey to deepen the emotions excited by the tragedy and to reflect back a sort of added horror upon all that had preceded it, so this strange, unprompted question, with its suggestions of insanity and death, seemed to render more vivid and terrible the stories of human suffering that I had just heard, and to intensify all the emotions roused in my mind by the great tragedy of penal servitude.
I remained with the political convicts that night until after midnight, and then walked home with my blood in a fever that even the frosty atmosphere of a semi-arctic night could not cool. Everybody had gone to bed except Mr. Frost, who was watching anxiously for my return. I threw myself on the divan in my room and tried to get to sleep; but all that I had just seen and heard kept surging through my mind, and it was morning before I finally lost consciousness.
