THE HISTORY OF THE KARA POLITICAL PRISON 275

they live and work with ordinary felons of the hard-labor class. This is a return to the method of treating polit- icals that was practised more than forty years ago, when the gifted Russian novelist Dostoyefski was sent to Si- beria in chains, and worked and was flogged with common criminals in .the convict prison of Omsk. Most intelligent Russian officials are now ashamed of that episode in the his- tory of their literature and their Government. The time, I hope, is not far distant when they will be even more ashamed of flogging women, chaining school-teachers to wheelbarrows, and subjecting political convicts generally to treatment from which they gladly escape by suicide. On the 12th of November Mr. Frost and I left the mines of Kara forever, and with glad hearts turned our faces, at last, homeward. As we drove away, with Major Potulof, from the Lower Diggings, two political convicts, in long gray overcoats, who were walking towards the prison at a distance of one hundred and fifty or two hundred yards from the road, saw and recognized us, and as we passed they stopped, removed their caps, and made towards us what the Russians call a "waist bow" — a bow so low that the body is bent at right angles from the waist. It was their last mute farewell to the travelers who had shown them sympathy and pity, and it is the last remembrance I have of the mines of Kara. We spent that night in the house of the overseer of the Ust Kara prison, at the mouth of the river, and on the following morning remounted our horses for another ride across the mountains to Stretinsk. Major Potulof opened a bottle of white Crimean wine after we had climbed into our saddles, and, pouring out a glassful for each of us and for himself, said, "Here 's to the beginning of a journey to America ! " We drank the stirrup-cup with bright anticipa- tions of a return to home and friends, thanked Major Potu- lof for his kindness and hospitality, promised to apprise him by telegraph of our safe arrival at Stretinsk, and rode away

into the mountains.