Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 1.djvu/371

Rh prison, nor can one listen without the deepest emotion to such stories as we heard from political exiles in Tomsk, Krasnoyársk, Irkútsk, and the Trans-Baikál. One pale, sad, delicate woman, who had been banished to Eastern Siberia, and who had there gone down into the valley of the shadow of death, undertook, one night, I remember, to relate to me her experience. I could see that it was agony for her to live over in narration the sufferings and bereavements of her tragic past, and I would gladly have spared her the self-imposed torture; but she was so determined that the world should know through me what Russians endure before they become terrorists, that she nerved herself to bear it, and between fits of half-controlled sobbing, during which I could only pace the floor, she told me the story of her life. It was the saddest story I had ever heard. After such an interview as this with a heart-broken woman—and I had many such—I could neither sleep nor sit still; and to the nervous strain of such experiences, quite as much as to hardship and privation, was attributable the final breaking down of my health and strength in the Trans-Baikál.

Before I left the city of Tomsk for Eastern Siberia, most of my long-cherished opinions with regard to nihilists and the working of the exile system had been completely overthrown. I could not, by any process of readjustment or modification, make my preconceived ideas fit the facts as I found them. In a letter written from Tomsk to the President of The Century Company on the 26th of August, 1885, I indicated the change that had taken place in my views as follows:

The exile system is much worse than I supposed. Mr. 's examination of prisons and study of the exile system were extremely superficial. I cannot understand how, if he really went through the Tiumén and Tomsk forwarding prisons, he could have failed to see that their condition and the condition of their wretched inmates were in many respects shocking. Nobody here has tried