or forty years of age, received us with the most cordial hospitality, insisted upon our taking a late breakfast with him, and after we had refreshed ourselves with tea, bread and butter, and delicious cutlets served with gravy and delicately browned potatoes, he went with us to the prison.
The Alexandrófski central prison is a large, two-story brick building with a tin roof, standing in a spacious inclosure formed by a high buttressed brick wall. It is somewhat irregular in form, but its greatest length is about 300 feet and its greatest width about 100, with a rather spacious courtyard in the middle. It contains fifty-seven general kámeras, in which a number of prisoners are shut up together, ten solitary-confinement cells, and five "secret" cells, intended for the isolation of particularly important or dangerous criminals. It contained at the time of our visit 992 convicts, while about 900 more, who had finished their terms of probation, were living outside the prison walls in the free command. We were taken first to the mills, which were large vaulted apartments in the first story, where 75 or 100 convicts were grinding rye into meal for their own use. The air here was fresh and good; the labor, although hard, was not excessive; and the men who turned the cranks of the clumsy machines were relieved by others as fast as they became tired. This, the warden informed me, was the only hard labor that the inmates of the prison were required to perform, and it occupied only three or four hours a day. From the mills we went to the kámeras, which filled the greater part of the large building, and which were occupied by from 15 to 75 men each. They varied greatly in size and form, but all were large enough for the number of convicts that they contained; the ceilings in them were high; the air everywhere was good; the floors and sleeping-benches were scrupulously clean; and nothing seemed to call for unfavorable criticism except perhaps the lack of bedding. In all the cells I noticed ventilators, but some of them had been stopped up with rags or articles of cloth-
