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Rh prisoners. I expressed my satisfaction to the isprávnik, and said that I had not seen so good a prison in the Empire.

"Yes," he replied; "if they do not overcrowd it, it will be very comfortable. But if we have to shut up 700 prisoners in the old prison we shall probably be expected to put 3000 into this one, and then the state of things will be almost as bad as ever." Whether the isprávnik's fears have been justified by events, I do not know; but the fact remains that the new prison at Vérkhni Údinsk is far and away the best building of its kind that we saw in the Empire except at St. Petersburg, and we were more than gratified to see at last some tangible evidence that the Russian Government does not regard the sufferings of its exiled criminals with absolute indifference.

We left Vérkhni Údinsk on Monday, October 19th, for a ride about three hundred miles to the town of Chíta, which is the capital of the Trans-Baikál. The weather was more wintry than any that we had yet experienced; but no snow had fallen, the sky was generally clear, and we did not suffer much from cold except at night. At first the road ran up the shallow, barren, uninteresting valley of the Úda River, between nearly parallel ranges of low mountains, and presented, so far as we could see, little that was interesting. The leaves had all fallen from the trees; the flowers, with the exception of here and there a frost-bitten dandelion, had entirely disappeared; and winter was evidently close at hand. We traveled night and day without rest, stopping only now and then to visit a Buddhist lamasery by the roadside or to inspect an étape. The Government has recently expended three or four hundred thousand rúbles ($150,000 to $200,000) in the erection of a line of new étapes through the Trans-Baikál. These buildings, the general appearance of which is shown in one of the three combined illustrations on page 126, are rather small and are not well spoken of by the officers of the exile