of the ruins or the purposes that they had served. I alighted from my teléga and entered the prison on the right of the corps-de-garde, thinking that I might discover a mural inscription left by some lonely and unhappy prisoner, or perhaps find one of the iron rings or staples in the wall to which refractory convicts were chained. Every scrap of iron, however, that could be used elsewhere had been stripped from the building; the floors had rotted away; the plaster had fallen; and nothing whatever remained to suggest to one's imagination the unwritten history of the gloomy prison, or bear witness to the cruelties and tragedies that had given to Akatúi its evil fame. The prison on the left of the corps-de-garde was in a much better state of repair than the other, and would doubtless have repaid a careful examination; but its windows were fastened, its heavy plank doors were secured with padlocks, and the warden said he did not know where the keys were or how we could gain admission. The entrance to the mine of Akatúi was on the hillside, five or six hundred feet above the bottom of the valley, and we could just see, in the deepening twilight, the outlines of a small tool-house that stood near the mouth of the shaft. At an earlier hour of the day I should have proposed to visit it; but the darkness of night was already gathering in the valley, the air was bitterly cold, and as the isprávnik and the warden seemed anxious to return to the Zavód I was obliged to content myself with such an examination of Akatúi as could be made in the vicinity of the prisons. Lúnin, one of the Decembrist conspirators of 1825, lived and died in penal servitude at this mine, and somewhere in the neighborhood lie buried many of the Polish patriots sent to Akatúi after the insurrection of 1863. I was unable, however, to find their graves. The Russian Government does not take pains to perpetuate the memory of the political offenders whom it tortures to death in its Siberian prisons, and over the moldering bodies of most of them there is not so much as a mound. Since my return from Siberia a new prison
