eyes, tried to engrave it on his memory, asked innumerable questions
about roads and water-courses, and betrayed so much agitation that the
young fellow noticed it, and exclaimed, "Ah! don't think of escape.
Too many of your countrymen have tried it, and those are fortunate
who, tracked on every side, famished, desperate, have been able to put
an end to themselves before being retaken, for if they are, then comes
the knout and a life of misery 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