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SIBERIA

moderate liberal to the position of a revolutionist. After trying, again and again, by peaceful and legal methods, to remedy some of the evils that she saw about her, and after being opposed and thwarted at every step by the censorship of the press, the police, and the Russian bureaucratic system, she became satisfied that nothing could be done without a change in the existing form of government; and she therefore joined one of the secret revolutionary circles, in Kiev. This circle was surprised and captured by the police in February, 1879, and Madam Kavaléfski was condemned as a revolutionist to thirteen years and four months of penal servitude, with exile to Siberia for life and deprivation of all civil rights. Professor Kavaléfskaya was not present at the meeting that was broken up by the police, and there was no proof that he had taken any active part in the revolutionary movement; but he was exiled by administrative process, nevertheless, to the little town of Minusínsk, in Eastern Siberia, nearly a thousand miles distant from the mines to which his wife was sent. Their little daughter Hallie was left in Kiev in the care of one of Madam Kavaléfskaya's sisters.

The long and terrible journey of nearly 5000 miles to the mines of Kará, the separation from her husband and child, and the hardships and loneliness of penal servitude broke down Madam Kavaléfskaya's health and strength; and in the autumn of 1880 she began to show signs of mental alienation. She had been allowed, up to that time, to correspond with her family; and I happen to have in my possession a copy of one of the letters that she received from her little daughter Hallie, who was then at school in Kiev. I have not space to describe the way in which this letter, with other documents, was smuggled out of Madam Kavaléfskaya's cell and put into my hands; but I will quote it, in order to show how, by means of such letters, the bleeding wounds of the poor woman's life were kept open until her brain could no longer bear the torture. If you will imagine Madam Kavaléfskaya in penal servitude at the