quoted by them that evening were Shakspere, Mill, Spencer, Buckle, Balfour Stewart, Heine, Hegel, Lange, Irving, Cooper, Longfellow, Bret Harte, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. They knew the name and something of the record of our newly elected President, discussed intelligently his civil-service reform policy and asked pertinent questions with regard to its working, and manifested generally an acquaintance with American affairs that one does not expect to find anywhere on the other side of the Atlantic, and least of all in Siberia.
After a plain but substantial supper, with delicious overland tea, the exiles sang for us in chorus some of the plaintive popular melodies of Russia, and Mr. Frost and I tried, in turn, to give them an idea of our college songs, our war songs, and the music of the American negroes. It must have been nearly midnight when we reluctantly bade them all good-by and returned to the Hotel Sibir.
It is impossible, of course, to give even the substance of the long conversations concerning the Russian Government and the Russian revolutionary movement which I had with the political exiles in Semipalátinsk. All that I aim to do at present is to describe, as fairly and accurately as possible, the impression that these exiles made upon me. If I may judge others by myself, American readers have had an idea that the people who are called nihilists stand apart from the rest of mankind in a class by themselves, and that there is in their character something fierce, gloomy, abnormal, and, to a sane mind, incomprehensible, which alienates from them, and which should alienate from them, the sympathies of the civilized world. If the political exiles in Semipalátinsk be taken as fair representatives of the class thus judged, the idea seems to me to be a wholly mistaken one. I found them to be bright, intelligent, well-informed men and women, with warm affections, quick sympathies, generous impulses, and high standards of honor and duty. They are, as Mr. Pávlovski said to me, "men and women who,
