BY ORDER OF THE CZAR. 145
lighted it, dragged a chair in front of his sketch, sat cross- legged upon it and looked at the canvas steadfastly, smoking all the time, and occasionally looking upwards, watching the blue wreaths break upon the cross beam, from which swung specimens of old flint guns, spears, bows and arrows, and a Roman corslet.
With the eye of imagination he saw his picture grow into what it might be, what he hoped it would be, not only a great work of art, but an everlasting rebuke to Russian tyranny not simply the study to which the Academy had awarded the Gold Medal, but the study which had perhaps brought the awful political disabilities of the Russians home to the sufferers, helping the champions of the people to break the chains that kept Liberty in prison, galled its flesh, and wore its brain to madness.
He had once seen of band a political prisoners and criminals start on their weary way to Siberia, and he had never forgotten it, nor would, though he was not. more than nine years old at the time. It was during the years his mother and father had lived in Moscow. Wherever they are condemned to Siberian exile by order of the Czar everything is by order of the Czar in that vast, despotically- governed empire they proceed first to Moscow, where, after a brief sojourn in the great convict prison there, they start on their awful journey, The prison is some distance from the city, and Philip remembered that he and his father rose very early to see the exiles leave, his father having some mission of benevolence to one of them, which he was allowed to undertake by order of the Czar, The penal settlement was a series of huts and houses sur^ rounded by a high wall. There were numerous sentinels, and they had many formalities to go through before Philip's father saw the wretched man for whom he had brought the Jast parting messages from a broken-hearted wife. The prisoners included both men and women, and they were as
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