stantly, broke the windows of her cell, and became so vio-

lent that it was necessary to put her into a strait- jacket. A short time afterward, however, upon the intercession of a humane officer — I think of Colonel Kononovich himself — she was permitted to join her husband in Minusinsk ; and there, under more favorable conditions of life, she recov- ered her reason. About a year later she was regarded as sane enough to be again subjected to torture, and she was therefore returned to the mines. When she became once more "insubordinate" and unmanageable there, she was brought back to the Irkutsk prison, where, with Mesdames Rossikova, Kutitonskaya, and Bogomolets, she engaged in a hunger-strike that lasted sixteen days, and that brought all four of the women very near to death. 1 Some time in 1887 Madam Kavalefskaya was sent for the third time to the mines, and in November, 1889, after the flogging to death of Madam Sigida, she committed suicide by taking poison.

When Madam Kavaléfskaya went insane in 1881, Colonel Kononóvich was still governor of the Kará penal establish- ment ; the free command had just been returned to prison, and Semyonofski had just shot himself in the house of his friend Charushin. Of course, Colonel Kononovich was greatly shocked both by Semyonofski's suicide and by Madam Kavalefskaya's insanity, but these were not the only tragedies that resulted from an enforcement of the Government's orders concerning the treatment of the politi- cal convicts. Soon after the self-destruction of Semyo- nofski, Uspenski, another political who had been sent back into prison, hanged himself in the prison bathhouse, while Rodin poisoned himself to death by drinking water in which he had soaked the heads of matches.

Colonel Kononóvich was too warm-hearted and sym- pathetic a man not to be profoundly moved by such terri- ble evidences of human misery. He determined to resign his position as governor of the Kará penal establishment,

1 This hunger-strike was a protest against cruel treatment at the hands of the Irkútsk chief of police.