Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 2.djvu/375

Rh miserable, as they tramped past us through the drifting snow on their way to the distant mines of the Trans-Baikál, that my feelings ran away with my prudential philosophy, and I put a few kopéks into every gray cap that was presented to me. The convicts all stared at us with curiosity as they passed; some greeted us pleasantly, a few removed their caps, and in five minutes they were gone, and a long, dark, confused line of moving objects was all that I could see as I looked after them through the white drift of the storm.

After we passed the party of convicts our monotonous life of night-and-day travel was not diversified by a single noteworthy incident. Now and then we met a rich merchant or an army officer posting furiously towards Irkútsk, or passed a long caravan of rude one-horse sledges laden with hide-bound chests of tea for the Nízhni Nóvgorod fair, but we saw no more exiles; the country through which we passed was thinly settled and uninteresting, and the wretched little villages where we stopped to change horses, or to refresh ourselves with tea, were literally buried in drifts of snow. At the post-station of Kamishétskaya, five hundred and thirty versts west of Irkútsk, we overtook two political offenders named Shamárin and Peterson who had just finished their terms of administrative exile in Eastern Siberia, and were on their way back to European Russia. We had made their acquaintance some weeks before in Irkutsk, and had agreed to travel with them, if possible, as far as Krasnoyársk; but our route differed somewhat from theirs at the outset, and, owing to our detention at the Alexandrófski central prison, and to our various mishaps on the Angará, we had fallen a little behind them. They greeted us joyously, shared their supper with us, and after an hour or two of animated conversation, in which we