offered to accompany us. The barge was, apparently, the same one that I had inspected in Tiumén two months before. Then it was scrupulously clean, and the air in its cabins was fresh and pure; but now it suggested a recently vacated wild-beast cage in a menagerie. It was no more dirty, perhaps, than might have been expected; but its atmosphere was heavy with a strong animal odor; its floors were covered with dried mud, into which had been trodden refuse scraps of food; its nári, or sleeping-benches, were black and greasy, and strewn with bits of dirty paper; and in the gray light of a cloudy day its dark kámeras, with their small grated port-holes, muddy floors, and polluted ammoniacal atmosphere, chilled and depressed me with suggestions of human misery.
The Rev. Henry Lansdell, in a magazine article published two or three years ago,[1] says, "I have seen some strong statements, alleging the extreme unhealthiness of these barges,. . . and I do not suppose that they are as healthy as a first-class sanatorium."
If Mr. Lansdell made a careful examination of a convict barge immediately after the departure from it of a convict party, the idea of a "sanatorium" certainly could not have been suggested to him by anything that he saw, touched, or smelled. It suggested to me nothing so much as a recently vacated den in a zoölogical garden. It was, as I have said, no more dirty and foul than might have been expected after ten days of such tenancy; but it could have been connected in one's mind with a "sanatorium" only by a violent wrench of the imagination. As a proof, however, that a convict barge in point of healthfulness does not fall far short of "a first-class sanatorium," Mr. Lansdell quotes a statement made to him by "an officer who had charge of the prisoners between Tiumén and Tomsk," to the effect that "during the season of 1882, 8 barges car-
- ↑ "Russian Convicts in the Salt Mines of Iletsk"; Harper's Magazine, May, 1888, pp. 894-910.
