movement. Her father is in the interior now, so she has unusual liberties.” I really might have guessed that her situation was something of this nature.
During the next few days I saw so many exiles in and about Tobolsk that I gave up the idea of visiting outlying settlements. Since I had neither the credentials, nor the time, for visiting the prisons, I only hoped and desired to talk with a fair number of exiles and hear their story of the conditions of political exile under the “constitution.” This I was able to accomplish right here.
One house of special interest in Tobolsk that all the politicals pointed out was a kind of community-house built by the Decembrists of 1825 who were sent to Tobolsk. During my stay here I met at least two men who had been exiled in 1878—they had both met Mr. Kennan when he was in Siberia in 1885, and asked me to carry their greetings to him, and to tell him that they were still there! One man, Kosturin, has made his lot more bearable by editing a newspaper, or rather, his wife edits and conducts the paper—officially.
The season was now advanced, snow-flurries were daily in the air, and there was a winter crisp in the trees that heralded the near approach of the icy storms that close Siberia through long months.
At four o’clock one morning we left Tobolsk in a post-chaise and drove continuously for thirty hours along the great Trakt to Tyumen—a distance of three hundred versts, stopping only at post-stations to change horses. In Tyumen we lingered long enough to say good-by to the men and women we had met coming in, and then traveled by train to Yekaterinburg.
This trip into Siberia was very short, superficial even, yet it proved worth while. I got a brief glimpse of the country, I visited the two most important towns of western Siberia, and I met many splendid men and women who are doomed to long exile, yet who were of good cheer. To merely have met them face to face, to have grasped their hands, and talked with them through the still hours of night—this, alone, was worth the long journey.
If I had needed any further evidence of the inhuman and utterly blind policy of the Russian government, I found it here in the treatment imposed upon men and women that any nation in the world should be proud of—verily the flower of the land.
At Yekaterinburg six weeks’ mail had accumulated, so that I spent several days here before crossing the Urals to Perm, where I rested again for nearly a week, before continuing my journey westward to Vyatka, which I found in many ways the most interesting province I had seen in Russia. The peasants there are very progressive, and through generations of practice have become marvelously skilful in wood-working. Some of the boxes I saw, with secret compartments, were examples of rare ingenuity and skill. There is a museum there of the peasant handicrafts which is most interesting. And withal the Vyatkans have a business sense which has enabled them to build up a profitable trade in these things with Siberia and Russia at large, through the Nijni-Novgorod fair and sales-shops in Moscow and St. Petersburg.