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314 after month, in dirty, overcrowded cells; plans and estimates for new buildings go back and forth, year after year, between the mines and St. Petersburg; and when, at last, a prison like that at Górni Zerentúi is authorized, work upon it drags along, in a lazy, shiftless fashion, for a whole decade, without the least apparent reason. I said one day to the resident mining-engineer at the Kutomárski Zavód, "Why don't you provide yourself with suitable iron machinery, furnish your laborers with improved modern tools, set up steam-pumping, hoisting, and ventilating apparatus, and work your mines as they ought to be worked? What is the use of pottering along in the way you do?"

"My dear sir," he replied, "do you know what iron costs here? We have to bring it with horses from Petrófski Zavód, a distance of more than 600 versts, and it costs, delivered here, 5½ rúbles a pud [about 7⅔ cents a pound]. We can't afford to put in iron machinery."

"But," I said, "is n't there iron ore in this vicinity?"

"Yes," he replied; "but it has never been gotten out."