fferings in prison.

The martyrs who took refuge in these Siberian paradises were very
numerous. It has been calculated that at the end of the nineteenth
century they numbered more than sixty-five thousand, and this is
probably less than the true figure, for, considering the terrible
ordinances of their religion, it is not likely that they would trouble
much about registering themselves for official statistics. We may
safely say that in 1889 there were about twelve hundred and fifty in
the neighbourhood of Yakutsk who had already accomplished their term of
forced labour. They formed ten villages, and it would be difficult to
specify their various nationalities, though it is known that in
Spasskoie, in 1885, there were, among seven hundred and ten members of
the sect, six hundred and ninety-three Russians, one Pole, one Swede,
and fifteen Finns.

To outward view their colonies were rather peculiar. Each village was
built with one long, wide street, and the houses were remarkable for
the solidity of their construction, for the flourishing gardens that
surrounded them, and for their unusual height in this desolate land
where, as a rule, nothing but low huts and hovels were to be seen. A
house was shared, generally, by three or four believers, and--perhaps
owing to their shattered nervous systems--they appeared to live in a
state of constant uneasiness, and always kept revolvers at hand. The
"brothers" occupied one side of the building, and the "sisters" the
other; and while the former practised their trades, or were engaged in
commerce, the women looked after the house, and led completely isolated
lives. On the arrival of a stranger they would hide, and if he offered
to shake hands with one of them, she would blush, saying, "Excuse me,
but that is forbidden to us," and escape into the house.

The existence of the "sisters" was indeed a tragic one. Deprived of
the sweetness of love or family life, without children, and at the
mercy of hardened egoists, such as the _skoptzi_ usually became, their
sequestered lives seemed to be cut off from all normal human happiness.

According to the author of an interesting article on the _skoptzi_ of
Olekminsk, which appeared in 1895 in the organ of the then-existing
Russian Ethnographical Society, these women were sometimes of an
astonishing beauty, and when opportunity offered, as it sometimes did
(their initiation not always being quite complete), they would marry
orthodox