Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 1.djvu/376

354 wearing on a string about its neck a huge cow-bell, and gnawing contentedly at a big raw turnip, as it paddled along the deserted street half-way up to its knees in mud. Whether the cow-bell was one of the child's playthings, or whether the mother had made use of it as a means of finding her offspring when she should return from the harvest field, I do not know; but the combination of child, turnip, and cow-bell, in a village that did not appear to contain another living inhabitant, was novel enough to attract my attention.

In the outskirts of another settlement we were reminded once more that we were in a penal colony by the sight of a handcuffed horse grazing peacefully by the roadside. I knew that the Russian Government had once flogged and exiled to Siberia a free-thinking and insubordinate church-bell because it had not self-control enough to hold its tongue when turned upside down; but I was a little startled, nevertheless, by the idea, which at once suggested itself to me, that the Government had taken to exiling and handcuffing "untrustworthy" horses. Upon making inquiries of the station-master, I was gratified to learn that this was not a horse that had behaved in a manner "prejudicial to public tranquillity" by refusing to neigh upon the accession to the throne of Alexander III., but was merely an animal addicted to vagrancy, whose owner had hobbled him with an old pair of Government handcuffs in order to prevent him from straying. The peasant to whom he belonged had unfortunately lost the key to the handcuffs, and for two or three months the horse had been as useless for all practical purposes as a spiked cannon.

Between the post-stations of Krasnorechínskaya and Bieloyárskaya, about twenty miles west of Áchinsk, we crossed the boundary line between the provinces of Tomsk and Yeniséisk, and entered the vast region known as Eastern Siberia. The boundary was marked by two brick columns about two feet square and seven feet high, which