The thought occurred to me again that they would not pardon me my attempts to escape, my efforts to identify myself again with the revolutionary movement. At the same time there pulsed so much life in my heart that I could not imagine the end of my activities. Neither the long terms passed in jail nor my exile in Yakutsk had dimmed my spirit. "I will live through all this," said an inner voice to me; "I will live through everything and live to see the bright days of freedom." From Yakutsk I was brought to Irkutsk, and my life here was filled with the same persecutions as my exile in Kirensk. I fell very ill and observed how the physicians carefully concealed from me the danger of my malady. It seemed so strange to me that people could think of my fatal end when my soul was full of complete faith that time was bringing me nearer daily to a different kind of end, the triumph of the revolution.
The longer the war continued the more horrible its consequences grew, the clearer the rascality of the government manifested itself, the more patent appeared the inevitableness of the rise of democracy all over the world, the nearer advanced also our revolution.
I waited for the sound of the bell announcing freedom, and wondered why this sound was tardy in making itself heard. When in November of last year explosions of indignation followed one another, when irate calls were exchanged among the several groups of the population, I was already planted with one foot in the Siberian sleigh, feeling sorry only that the snow road was beginning to melt.
The 17th of March a telegram reached me in Minusinsk announcing freedom. The same day I was on my way to Atchinsk, the nearest railroad station. From Atchinsk on began my uninterrupted communion with soldiers, peasants, workmen, railroad employees, students and multitudes of beloved women, who to-day all bear the burdens of the normal and now also abnormal life of a great state.
TALE OF AN AMAZING VOYAGE
German Officers Escape from Spain in a Sailing Vessel
Told by Frederic Lees
The Spanish Premier, Count Romanones, recently stated that the sensational story of the escape from Spain in a sailing vessel of a number of interned German officers, as briefly reported in El Liberal, of Madrid, is officially confirmed. With extraordinary assurance, the fugitives set out to sail right round the coast of Great Britain and reach a Belgian port, but the elements and the British Navy intervened, and the audacious scheme miscarried. The author's private sources of information have enabled him to throw light on a number of episodes which, in the Spanish and German newspapers, were intentionally left obscure. Related in the Wide World Magazine.