Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 2.djvu/225

Rh on the 28th of December he called the members of the free command together, read the order to them, told them that he had failed to obtain any modification of it, but said that he would, on his own personal responsibility, allow them three days more of freedom in which to settle up their domestic affairs. On the morning of January 1, 1881, they must report at the prison. To all the members of the free command this order was a terrible blow. For two years they had been living in comparative freedom in their own little cabins, many of them with their wives and children, who had made a journey of five thousand miles across Siberia in order to join them. At three days' warning they were to be separated from their families, sent back into prison, and put again into chains and leg-fetters. Some of them were leaving their wives and children alone and unprotected in a penal settlement, some of them were broken in health and could not expect to live long in the close confinement of a prison kámera, and all of them looked forward with dread to the chains, leg-fetters, foul air, vermin, and miseries innumerable of prison life.

In the free command, at that time, was living a young lawyer, thirty-three years of age, named Eugene Semyónofski. He was the son of a well-known surgeon in Kiev, and had been condemned to penal servitude for having been connected in some way with the "underground" revolutionary journal Onward. He was a man of high character and unusual ability, had had a university training, and at the time of his arrest was practising law in St. Petersburg. After four or five years of penal servitude at the mines his health gave way, and in 1879 he was released from prison and enrolled in the free command. At the last meeting of the political convicts and their wives, on New Year's Eve, it was noticed that Semyónofski seemed to be greatly depressed, and that when they parted he bade his comrades good-by with unusual manifestations of emotion and affection. About two o'clock that morning Mr. Charúshin, a political convict in whose little cabin Semyónofski was