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3 86 BY ORDER OF THE CZAR.

a merciful Czar, and this present history is not all one long record of Imperial tyranny, though the mercy found for the exile of Tobolsk, and the interposition of the direct Imperial power which marked the closing days of Anna Klosstock and her father, not to mention the release of Philip Forsyth, are romantic exceptions to the general out- come of those official " orders of the Czar," which fill the bleakest spots of the Siberian world with weeping and wail- ing and gnashing of teeth.

There are instances of exiles, as I have said, preferring to remain in the favored category of relaxed Siberian dis- cipline, wretched men and women who have outlived their friends, and who no longer feel that they possess the capacity to begin the new life that is offered to them. Possibly these cases are few and far between, but thousands of exiles, after their term of detection has ceased, continue in the country, becoming farmers, traders, trappers, and following the occupations from which they had been car- ried off by the strong and too often secret arm of the law.

Johannes Klosstock had for some years been permitted the highest privileges allowed to the exile ; and he had accepted the relief with the same religious resignation that had entered his soul from the first. He had long since ceased to suffer. The past had become to him a dream. Happy Czarovna was still his world. He walked out in summer days and saw Anna his wife. He sat by the stove in winter and talked with Losinski and the famous Italian traveler Ferrari. Once in a way there would come to him disturbing glimmerings of the bitter change that had left him all alone with only his dream. But he was a religious man ; he bowed his head and prayed, and looked forward to the coining of the Messiah, and to the reality of a reunion of wife and child.

One summer afternoon,sitting at the door of his simple hut, where he was permitted to have the attendance of an