mit to blows, should the
forfeit be his own life or another's, and the incessant apprehension
kept his mind in a state of frightful tension: it also nerved him to
physical exertions beyond his strength, and to a moral restraint of
which he had not deemed himself capable in the way of endurance and
self-command. But in the end he was the gainer. After the first year
he was taken into the office of the establishment, and received a
salary of ten francs a month. He was also allowed to leave the
barracks where he had been herded with the convicts, and to lodge with
two fellow-countrymen in a little house which they built for
themselves, and which they shared with the soldiers who guarded them.
It was a privilege granted to the most exemplary of the convicts to
lodge with one or other of the private inhabitants of the village; but
besides their own expenses they had to pay those of the soldier
detailed to watch them. In the course of the winter they were
comforted by the visit of a Polish priest. A certain number are
permitted, to travel through Siberia yearly, stopping wherever there
are Polish prisoners to administer the sacraments and consolations of
their Church to them: there is no hardship which these heroic men will
not encounter in performing their thrice holy mission. Piotrowski,
who, like all Poles, was an ingrained Roman Catholic, after passing
through phases of doubt and disbelief had returned to a fervent
orthodoxy: this spiritual succor was most precious to himself and his
brother-exiles.

One idea, however, was never absent from his mind--that of escape. At
the moment of receiving his sentence at Kiow he had resolved to be
free, and his resolution had not faltered. He had neglected no means
of acquiring information about Siberia and the adjacent countries. For
this he had listened to the revolting confidences of the malefactors
at the barracks--for this he heard with unflagging attention, yet with
no sign of interest, the long stories of the traders who came to the
distillery from all parts of the empire to sell grain or buy spirits.
The office in which he passed his time from eight in the morning
until ten or eleven at night was their _rendezvous_, and by a
concentration of his mental powers he acquired a thorough and accurate
knowledge of the country from the Frozen Ocean to the frontiers of
Persia and China, and of all its manners and customs. The prisoner who
meditates escape, he says, is absorbed in an i