Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 2.djvu/429

Rh anthropology, and the museum, and behaved, generally, as if it afforded me the greatest pleasure to tell them — the colonel of gendarmes and the procureur — all that I was doing in Minusínsk, and to share with them all my experiences. What reports were made to St. Petersburg with regard to us I do not know; but they had no evil results. We were not searched and we were not arrested.

Upon the advice of some of my friends in Minusínsk, I decided to get rid of all my note-books, documents, letters from political convicts, and other dangerous and incriminating papers, by sending them through the mails to a friend in St. Petersburg. To intrust such material to the Russian postal department seemed a very hazardous thing to do, but my friends assured me that the postal authorities in Minusínsk were honorable men, who would not betray to the police the fact that I had sent such a package, and that there was little probability of its being opened or examined in St. Petersburg. They thought that the danger of losing my notes and papers in the mails was not nearly so great as the danger of having them taken from me as the result of a police search. The material in question amounted in weight to about forty pounds, but as packages of all sizes are commonly sent by mail in Russia, mere bulk in itself was not a suspicious circumstance. I had a box made by an exiled Polish carpenter, took it to my room at night, put into it the entire results of my Siberian experience, — most of the dangerous papers being already concealed in the covers of books and the hollow sides of small boxes, — sewed it up carefully in strong canvas, sealed it with more than twenty seals, and addressed it to a friend in St. Petersburg whose political trustworthiness was beyond suspicion and whose mail, I believed, would not be tampered with. Thursday morning about half an hour before the semi-weekly post was to leave Minusínsk for St, Petersburg, I carried the box down into the courtyard under the cover of an overcoat, put it into a sleigh, threw a robe over it, and