Krasnoyársk. A second refusal to take the oath of allegiance resulted in their being sent to Irkútsk. By this time winter had set in, and they were traveling in an open tárantás with a delicate baby thirteen months of age. It was with the greatest difficulty that Mrs. Cherniávski could keep her baby warm, and at the last station before reaching Irkútsk she removed the heavy wrappings in which she had enveloped it and found it dead. With the shock of this discovery she became delirious, and wept, sang pathetic little nursery songs to her dead child, rocked it in her arms, and prayed and cursed God by turns. In the courtyard of the Irkútsk forwarding prison, in a temperature of thirty degrees below zero, Mr. Cherniávski stood for half an hour waiting for the party to be formally received, with his wife raving in delirium beside him and his dead child in his arms.
Mrs. Cherniávski lay in the prison hospital at Irkútsk until she recovered her reason, and to some extent her strength, and then she and her husband were sent 2000 miles farther to the northeastward under guard of gendarmes, and colonized in a Yakút settlement known as the Batarúski ulús, situated in the taigá or primeval wilderness of Yakútsk, 165 miles from the nearest town. There, suffering almost every conceivable hardship and privation, they lived until 1884, when the Minister of the Interior allowed them to return to a more civilized part of Siberia.
Mrs. Cherniávski when I made her acquaintance was a pale, delicate, hollow-cheeked woman, whose health had been completely wrecked by years of imprisonment, banishment, and grief. She had had two children, and had lost them both in exile under circumstances that made the bereavement almost intolerable; for seven years she had been separated by a distance of many thousand miles from all of her kindred; and the future seemed to hold for her absolutely nothing except the love of the husband whose exile she could still share, but whose interest she could do so little
