y beyond words. In Heaven's name, give up
that thought!" The commandant of the fortress paid him a short
official visit, and exclaimed repeatedly, "How sad! how sad! to come
back when you were free-in a foreign country!" The chief of police, a
hard, dry, vulture-like man, asked why he had dared to return without
the czar's permission. "I could not bear my homesickness," replied the
prisoner. "O native country!" said the Russian in a softened voice,
"how dear thou art!" After various official interviews he was taken to
the governor-general's ante-chamber, where he found a number of
clerks, most of whom were his exiled compatriots and received him
warmly. While he was talking with them a door opened, and Gortchakoff
stood on the threshold: he fixed his eyes on the prisoner for some
moments, and withdrew without a word. An hour of intense anxiety
followed, and then an officer appeared, who announced that he was
consigned to the distilleries of Ekaterininski-Zavod, some two hundred
miles farther north.

Ekaterininski-Zavod is a miserable village of a couple of hundred
small houses on the river Irtish, in the midst of a wide plain. Its
inhabitants are all in some way connected with the government
distillery: they are the descendants of criminals formerly
transported. Piotrowski, after a short interview with the inspector of
the works, was entered on the list of convicts and sent to the
guard-house. "He is to work with his feet in irons," added the
inspector. This unusual severity was in consequence of a memorandum in
Prince Gortchakoff's own writing appended to the prisoner's papers:
"Piotrowski must be watched with especial care." The injunction was
unprecedented, and impressed the director with the prisoner's
importance. Before being taken to his work he was surrounded by his
fellow-countrymen, young men of talent and promise, who were there,
like himself, for political reasons. Their emotion was extreme: they
talked rapidly and eagerly, exhorting him to patience and silence, and
to do nothing to incur corporal punishment, which was the mode of
keeping the workmen in order, so that in time he might be promoted,
like themselves, from hard labor to office-work. At the guard-house he
found a crowd of soldiers, among whom were many Poles, incorporated
into the standing army of Siberia for having taken up arms for their
country. This is one of the mildest punishments for that offence. They
seized every pretext for speaking to