Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 2.djvu/349

Rh really thought of the Kará prisons and the prison administration? I hardly dared say anything, for fear of making a mistake. Without waiting, however, for any remarks from me, Colonel Nóvikof said, "I lived at Kará as commander of the Cossack battalion for three years and a half; and when I was finally relieved from duty there, a few months ago, I was so glad that I had a special thanksgiving service read in the church.

"Do you see my beard?" he demanded abruptly after a moment's pause. "It is all sprinkled with gray, is n't it? That 's the result of the human misery that I was compelled to witness at the mines. When I went there, there was n't a white hair in it. How old do you think I am?"

I replied that I should take him to be about fifty-five.

"I am only forty-five," he said bitterly; "and when I went to Kará I was as young-looking a man as you are."

He paused for a moment, as if in gloomy retrospection, and I ventured to ask him what was the nature of the mis- ery to which he referred.

"Misery of all kinds," he replied. "The wretched convicts are cruelly treated, flogged with rods and the plet [a sort of heavy cat], and worked for the benefit of their overseers, who enrich themselves at the convicts' expense. As for the suffering and injustice, I will give you an instance of it. While I was there the wife of the warden of one of the prisons accidentally discovered that her lover — a convict of the free command — was carrying on an intrigue with one of her servants, a good-looking girl belonging also to the criminal class. Enraged by jealousy, she made such representations to her husband the warden as to induce him to have the servant-girl flogged. The girl received 150 blows with the stick on her bare body, and then when she went to the zavéduyushchi [the governor of the penal establishment] and complained of the cruel treatment to which she had been subjected, she got ninety blows more with the plet, — 240 blows in all, — and I stood by and saw