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325 ADVENTURES IN EASTERN SIBERIA 325 courtesy and consideration, and had even been permitted to engage in branches of business, such as teaching and photography, that by law are closed to political offend- ers. All of their correspondence was still "under control" — that is, subject to official supervision and censorship — but they were not constantly watched, regulated, and harassed by the police, as political exiles are in so many other parts of Siberia, and it seemed to me that their life, although hard and lonely, was perfectly tolerable. Mr. Cham- shin, before his banishment, spent four years and a half in solitary confinement, and for two years and a half lay in one of the bomb-proof casemates of the Petropavlovski for- tress. His offense was carrying on a revolutionary propa- ganda among the factory operatives in one of the suburbs of St. Petersburg. When he was finally sent to Siberia, in 1878, his wife voluntarily accompanied him, and at the mines of Kara she lived alone in a wretched little cabin at the Lower Diggings until, upon the expiration of his term of probation, Mr. Charushin was permitted to join her. He was one of the nine political convicts of the free command sent back to prison by order of Loris-Melikof on the 1st of January, 1881, and it was in his house that poor Eugene Semyonofski committed suicide on the eve of that day. Sunday morning, November 29th, after bidding good-by with sincere regret to Mr. and Mrs. Chaiushin, whose warm hearts and lovable characters had won our affection and es- teem, we left Nerchinsk in a sleigh for Chita, the capital of the Trans-Baikal. The icicles that hung from the nostrils of our frost- whitened horses, the sharp metallic creaking of the crisp snow under our sledge-runners, the bluish, opalescent tints of the distant mountains, and the high, slender columns of smoke that stood, without waver or tremble, over the chim- neys of the houses were all evidences of a very low, if not an arctic, temperature; and I was not surprised, when I looked at our thermometer, to find the mercury stationary