whose snowy slopes limited the vision in every direction. As we ascended this valley the hills shut it in more and more closely, until, a mile and a half or two miles beyond the small village of Akatúi, it became a secluded and inexpressibly dreary glen, where there were no signs of life except the stunted and leafless bushes which here and there
broke the uniform whiteness of the snow-covered hills. It seemed to me that I had never seen a place so lonely, so cheerless, so isolated from all the living world. It might have been a valley among the arctic hills of Greenland near the Pole.
"Here is the old political prison," said the isprávnik; and as he spoke we stopped in front of a peculiar, half-ruined log building, which had once apparently been covered with stucco or plaster, and through the middle of which ran a high-arched gateway. On the flanks of this structure, and forty or fifty yards from it, stood two weather-beaten prisons of stuccoed brick, one of them roofless, and both gradually falling into ruins. It was evident that these prisons had once been surrounded by a stockade, and that the log building with the arched gateway was the corpsde-garde through which admission was had to the inclosure. The stockade, however, had long before disappeared, the iron gratings had been removed from the windows, and little remained to indicate to a careless observer the real nature
