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316 cheap and insignificant, as usual, but one of them contained a small steam-engine — the first and only machine of the kind that I saw in the Trans-Baikál. While Mr. Frost was making a sketch of the building and of the dreary arctic landscape, I went through the mine, but found little to reward me for the labor of climbing up and down the icy ladders. The shaft was less than a hundred feet in depth; the galleries were so low that I could not anywhere stand upright; the atmosphere was damp and chilly, and the roofs and walls were thickly incrusted with frost or ice. Only thirty-five convicts were at work in the mine, and most of them seemed to be engaged in carrying ore in small wicker baskets to the hoisting shaft, emptying it into square wooden buckets holding about a bushel each, and then raising it to the surface, a bucketful at a time, by means of a clumsy old wooden windlass. I doubted whether methods more primitive were employed even by the aborigines who worked these silver veins three centuries earlier. Certainly none more primitive had ever come under my observation. I said to the ustávshchik, or overseer, who conducted me through the mine, "Why don't you set more men at work here? I have just come from the prison, where I found at least 150 convicts idle."

"We have n't room for more than thirty-five or forty men in the galleries," he replied soberly.

"But you can extend the mine, can you not?" I inquired. "Fifty or a hundred more laborers could soon make room for themselves by digging and blasting. If the ore is there, why not extend your operations and get it out as rapidly as possible? You ought to widen and heighten your galleries, lay down tramways in them, improve your hoisting apparatus, employ horse power, and work on a larger scale."

The ustávshchik made no reply, but looked at me in a surprised way, as if he regarded my ideas as utterly wild and impracticable.

The number of hard-labor convicts in the Nérchinsk silver-mining district at the time of our visit was