at the map will show the geographical location of far-away
Siberia, but no map, no book will tell you what a hell on earth this
northernmost arm of the Russian Empire is.

But little is known of it in Russia itself, not even by the members of
the autocratic political family, beyond the fact of its being a dreary,
frozen land of political exile, a region without light or hope for the
banished.

The people shudder at the mention of it, for they have heard much of it
from the broken wretches who have been fortunate enough to escape, after
years of toil and suffering. They know that the innocent as well as the
guilty are liable to be sent there; that thousands upon thousands have
died or been murdered there by the autocrat's petty tyrants, placed
there to guard and work them, and that their bones molder or bleach upon
the inhospitable shores, where wolves lay in wait for the bodies of
victims which are thrown where they can reach them, and thus save the
trouble of burial.

A large portion of the penal colony is honey-combed with mines, which
the prisoners are forced to work for the benefit of the government that
has exiled them there; and thousands of poor wretches, when once forced
into them, never again see the light of day, but drag out a miserable
existence hundreds of feet underground.

The serfs have been nominally freed; but slavery of the most horrible
and degrading kinds is rampant in Russia to-day. The press is gagged and
suppressed, and no man is free to speak his opinion regarding the
tyrants and their doings.

Is it any wonder the people meet in secret conclave and resort to
dynamite?

After a long and dreary passage, William Barnwell was landed, with his
companions in misery, not one of whom could speak English, in Siberia,
more dead than alive.

They had been treated worse than cattle during transportation, and now
their fortunes were on the eve of being made even worse.

However guilty the others of his party may have been, his case was one
of the grossest injustice, and one that the United States would have
been quick to demand satisfaction for had there been an opportunity of
finding it out.

As before stated, there is no such a thing in Russia as justice. All is
selfish tyranny and inborn ingratitude.

They--the members of the secret tribunal--knew that the important letter
which enabled the government to arrest dangerous and wholly unsuspected
enemies had been brought over by a young America