for
"b" and so on. From this laborous method she learned another code which
was the one generally in use among the imprisoned revolutionists; and
she spent long hours communicating with friends in different parts of
the prison who were in solitary confinement like herself, and whom she
had never seen.

At last Catherine was brought up for trial and was sentenced to exile
in Siberia. Because she told her judges that she refused to acknowledge
the authority of the Czar she was given an extra sentence of five years
at hard labor in the mines. She had already been in prison several
years awaiting trial--and out of three hundred who had been imprisoned
in the same jail more than one hundred had died or become insane.

Catherine then commenced a weary two months journey into Siberia, where
she was first to go to prison and later remain as an exile. The
prisoners traveled in covered wagons, that jolted and bumped endlessly
over the rough roads, and at night they were thrown into roadside
jails, filthy beyond description. For eight long weeks this journey
continued until Catherine reached the prison at Kara.

Here she was not compelled to work after all, but was forced to eat the
vilest food and wear out her soul in idleness, with no occupation
except to witness the sufferings of her companions. When her prison
term was ended she was taken to a little town called Barguzon near the
Arctic Circle, where the thermometer often dropped to fifty below zero,
and here she was kept under close guard for many years.

Words cannot describe the misery of the Siberian exiles as Catherine
saw them--men, women and children, sick and forlorn, compelled to march
for miles over the bleak countryside, surrounded by brutal guards who
prodded them on with their bayonets. After she had been for some time
at Barguzon she tried to escape with three men who were also political
exiles, and sought to gain the Pacific coast a thousand miles away,
where she hoped she might take ship for America. She was pursued and
recaptured, and given another term in the prison at Kara on account of
her attempt to escape.

Catherine was a young woman when she went into exile; she remained
until she was old and her hairs were gray before her term of punishment
ended. She had been in exile more than twenty years and in all that
time she had not seen one of her relatives or heard the voice of a
friend. At last she was set free.

When she arrived at her former home sh