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336 breach of confidence, that I did call upon him, and that I am indebted to him for many of the facts set forth in the four preceding chapters. He confirmed most of the statements made to me by the political convicts at Kará, gave me an account of the shooting of Governor Ilyashévich that did not differ in any essential respect from the narrative of Madam Kutitónskaya herself, and permitted me to see official documents of the utmost interest and value. If he had in view any other object than the establishment of the truth, I do not know what it was.

During our stay of nearly two weeks in Chíta I spent a large part of every day with "trustworthy" citizens and officials in order to avert suspicion, and then devoted the greater part of every night to the political convicts. We met the latter, as a rule, in a carpenter-shop maintained by some of them as a means of self-support in a large two-story log house once occupied by the famous Decembrist exiles of 1825. About nine o'clock every evening, ten or fifteen politicals would assemble in a spacious upper room over this carpenter-shop, and there, at a somewhat later hour, Mr. Frost and I would join them. Fanny Morénis, a bright and very pretty girl about twenty years of age, generally acted as hostess; Madam Géllis presided over the samovár; and by half-past ten o'clock every evening we were all grouped about a big table on one side of the room, smoking, drinking tea, relating our adventures, and discussing all sorts of social and political questions. Among the exiles in Chíta were some of the brightest, most cultivated, most sympathetic men and women that we had met in Eastern Siberia; and I still remember, with mingled feelings of pleasure and sadness, the hours that we spent with them. We were not always depressed and gloomy, nor did we always look on the dark penal side of Russian life. Sometimes Mr. Lázaref, or Mr. Valúief, would take up an old battered guitar, and sing, to its accompaniment, a