Page:The Boy Travellers in the Russian Empire.djvu/320

314 "The most of them were sent to the mines of Nertchinsk, where they were kept at labor for two years. Afterwards they were employed in a polishing-mill at Chetah and on the public roads for four or five years, and at the end of that time were allowed to settle in the villages and towns, making their living in any way that was practicable. Some of them were joined by their wives, who had property in their own right (the estates of the exiles were confiscated at the time of their banishment), and those thus favored by matrimonial fortune were able to set up fine establishments.

"Some of the Decembrists, as these particular exiles were called, from the revolution having occurred in December, died within a few years but the most of them lived to an advanced age. When Alexander II.



the throne, in 1856, all the Decembrists were pardoned. Some of them returned to European Russia after thirty-one years of exile, but they found things so changed, and so many of their youthful companion dead, that they wrote back and advised those who were still in Siberia to stay there. My first visit to Siberia was in 1866, forty-one years after the December revolution. At that time there were ten or twelve of the Decembrists still living, all of them venerable old men. One was a prosperous