hotel, and the idea of my going up to the prison and asking to be shown around seemed simply preposterous: besides, there were three cordons of sentries about the prison settlement, which I could see, about half a mile away from the river, on the brow of a hill. In this mood I walked down a side street, and seeing the sign of a photographer, concluded to go in and have a talk about plates and slides and developers. I only hoped to succeed in killing half an hour of the time, but it turned out to be a most happy inspiration. to which I owe some of the pleasantest hours I spent in Siberia. The photographer was a Frenchman, a man of education and refinement. We had lived in Paris about the same time; we had both read and admired the poems of Mand of D, which are now, after ten years, still announced as en préparation. had never met in Paris, but we had both been subscribers to La Batte des Décadents. That was certainly a close bond of union, for there were only three other subscribers. When I told my new friend, or, rather, new-found old friend, that the poet D - was writing the bicycle chron

We

icle in one of the great Parisian dailies, he went all to pieces, and he told me several times he felt more distressed by this piece of news than by his isolated life in Siberia. When this exchange of souvenirs in regard to distant places and times so dear to us both was over, I told him what I wanted. He put on his hat and said: "Well, come along; we'll go up to see the chief of police; he's a good friend of mine. You tell him that you want your passport visaed,' to have everything right and proper, and while this is being done I'll say you want to go through the convict station, and he'll show you around himself, I'm sure."

"But I haven't any credentials!" I exclaimed. How will he know but that I am a Nihilist, or something like that?"

"Oh, that will be all right," said my new-found friend. "I'll go your bail."

With that he slipped his arm in mine, and we walked up the street to the police headquarters. I felt as though I were upon my native heath, or even in Texas, and I owed all my photographer's kindly support to the perusal, more than ten years ago, of some poems which were too

good to be published! Our meeting was one of the strangest coincidences of my life, and nothing but pleasant results flowed from it, which is unusual after meetings of this kind. Why this French photographer was in Siberia I never knew. In Siberia it is even less safe than in other countries to inquire into people's antecedents, so I never asked. I hoped that the chief of police would some day tell me, but in this I was disappointed.

In a few minutes we entered the police headquarters-a long, rambling frame building, which was at once the headquarters of the police and of the firemen. Clinging to the topmost rungs of a ladder stretching far above the roof of a tower, a fireman was on the lookout for the outbreak of flame anywhere in the settlement. A rope connected the lookout tower with the stable, and this he pulled when it was necessary to give the alarm. We went into headquarters, and were received most kindly and courteously by the chief. He was a handsome, finelooking man, of about forty, and when I told him that I was an American traveller, and would like very much to see the penal station here, which I understood was the central station of the whole province, he said that he would show me around it with the greatest of pleasure, and in five minutes-he having

rounded by a still higher fence, watched and guarded by sentries, only fifty feet apart, with repeating-rifles, and bayonets fixed. This fence was thirty feet high, and spiked on top. To me it seemed quite impossible for any prisoner to make his escape, but later I was shown one who made his escape three times, carrying with him his foot chains and his manacles.

There are no cells in the prison, and the prisoners live, four or five together, in large rooms about thirty feet long and twenty broad. They are perfectly free to move about in these rooms at their will, and only those whose bad behavior had been repeated and seemed incorrigible were wearing manacles or were restrained by chains. The beds in which they sleep are the same little iron bedsteads upon which I had slept in all the hotels in Siberia. Each of these rooms or dormitories in which the prisoners were confined, except in the hour or two each day in which they were permitted to walk up

spoken to no one in the mean while-I entered his carriage and we drove to the prison.

The prison was a great long building, surrounded by half a dozen storehouses and other smaller buildings. Each one stood in a separate enclosure, surrounded by a high fence and barred gates, with soldiers on guard. The whole place, about half a mile in circumference, was sur

and down in the jail yard, is lighted by from three to six large windows, which, though they are heavily barred and wired off to prevent the possibility of escape, admit plenty of sunlight. In the corridor upon which these dormitories open there were stationed sentries, and now and again a patrol of four or five soldiers would pass tramping through the long echoing corridors to see that each and

every sentry was at his post and that all was quiet in the prison. I spent some time in the kitchen, which was scrupulously clean, and the food that was supplied to the convicts was of the same quality as that served out to the soldiers -soup, boiled beef, heavy rye bread, and rather insipid kvass.

There was not a knout in the prison, though this merciless scourge of cowhide thong knotted together is still used, and with advantage, I am told, upon the more hardened criminals at Nicolaieff and Sakhalin. The convicts and prisoners I found uniformly cheerful, apparently in good spirits, and in good health. There was not a dark cell in the whole prison, and the punishment of solitary confinement, not unknown to our own penal system, was abolished here many years ago. The only punishments, in fact, practised in the prison at Khabarovka are the putting on of the chains and the manacles, and an occasional sentence upon some incorrigible to a diet of bread and water. In the

prison there were men of all nationalitiesJapanese, Chinese, Koreans, Goldies, and Russians-and they messed and roomed together, receiving absolutely the same treatment and the same food. They are divided into companies of ten, and each division is told to elect a starosta, or captain, and he becomes responsible in the eyes of the prison authorities for the nine men who have honored him with their votes. Whenever a detachment of ten men is responsible for some infringement of prison rules, and the individual delinquent cannot be ascertained, the captain, or starosta, receives the punishment. This system, it is said, works well, and makes for law and order and good behavior in the dormitories. The captain, who must bear the brunt of all punishment, naturally is a friend of law and order, and his nine companions not unnaturally feel bound to spare him the infliction of punishment as often as they reasonably can, out of brotherly feeling springing from a common misfortune.

There were at this time in the prison some four hundred convicts, and there were in the immediate vicinity of Khabarovka at least two hundred more that had been let out to contractors for work on the railway. They were convicts of all classes, though only two or three political prisoners. Some were on their way to Sakhalin, and some were return

ing from there, as the time for the expiration of their sentences was approaching; and other convicts were only waiting the decision of the authorities as to their destination-as to where their sentences should be carried out. I walked through each and every one of the corridors in the prison, accompanied by the chief of police and the chief wardena most kindly and mild-looking old gentlemanand they were evidently doing their very best to show me everything that was to be seen, and to give me a clear idea of the inside working of prison life, and the daily routine of the prisoners.

As we passed along the corridor the prisoners, hearing our footsteps. gathered round the grated door, and when the chief of police and the chief warden came in sight, would give the military salute, and shout, "Good-morning, your lordships." Then the chief of police and the warden would look them over, the warden telling his chief exactly what the men had been doing, and what report of their conduct he had to make since the last visit of inspection. For almost every one of his fellows, as he called them, the kindly warden had something pleasant or nothing at all to say, whereupon the chief would draw himself up, and say, turning to the prisoners, "Well, my little brothers, it is well; I am glad to hear good reports of you." And they would invariably reply, in a loud, cheerful chorus, We are always very happy when your lordship is pleased with us." As we walked along the corridor we came to another and a larger room. The "Good-morning, your lordships," which rang out towards us from this room had a

more cheerful ring-a something which cannot be counterfeited or disguised. Before I came to the door and saw that the men who spoke them no longer wore the prison stripes, I knew that these men were free, and the chief of police told me that they were only awaiting the coming of one of the regular convoys to start for home, free men, having paid their debt to society.

On the second floor of the prison was the jail for women. Admittance to it was secured only after a parley through the iron grating in the heavily barred doors. They were at last thrown back by women turnkeys, all dressed in black, and each carrying a great pistol in a holster, with open flap, ready for use. None of the women prisoners were in chains, and they occupied large and sunny rooms, never more than two in a room. Several had their children with them. In one room we stopped and talked with two women who were as unlike as day is to night, and yet they taught an object-lesson in our common humanity and equality, despite the differences of race, religion, and color.