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Rh "a born orator who never made but two speeches in his life; one of them cost him ten years of penal servitude, and the other fifteen." Múishkin himself said, after reaching the mines of Kará, that there was only one thing in his life which he regretted, and that was his speech over the dead body of his comrade Dmokhófski in Irkútsk. The world could not hear it, it did no good, it was merely the gratification of a personal impulse, and it added so many years to his term of penal servitude that, even if he should live out that term, he would be too old, when finally released, to work any more for the cause of Russian freedom.

Muíshkin was one of the first of the eight prisoners who escaped from the Kará political prison in April, 1882, and he was recaptured, as I have said, in the seaport town of Vlàdivostók, to which American vessels come every summer. In 1883 he was sent back to St. Petersburg, with a party of other "dangerous" politicals, and incarcerated in the castle of Schlusselburg. In the autumn of 1885, fearing that, as a result of long solitary confinement, he was about to go insane, he struck one of the castle officers, with the hope that he would be put to death. The experiment that had failed in the Kharkóf