. Siberia and the exile system. ten oclock every evening wewere all grouped about a big table on one side of the room,smoking, drinking tea, relating our adventures, and discuss-ing all sorts of social and political questions. Among theexiles in Chita were some of the brightest, most cultivated,most sympathetic men and women that we had met inEastern Siberia; and I still remember, with mingled feel-ings of pleasure and sadness, the hours that we spent withthem. We were not always depressed and gloomy, nor didwe always look on the dark penal side of Russian Mr. Lazaref,1 or Mr. V
. Siberia and the exile system. ten oclock every evening wewere all grouped about a big table on one side of the room,smoking, drinking tea, relating our adventures, and discuss-ing all sorts of social and political questions. Among theexiles in Chita were some of the brightest, most cultivated,most sympathetic men and women that we had met inEastern Siberia; and I still remember, with mingled feel-ings of pleasure and sadness, the hours that we spent withthem. We were not always depressed and gloomy, nor didwe always look on the dark penal side of Russian Mr. Lazaref,1 or Mr. Valuief, would take up anold battered guitar, and sing, to its accompaniment, a melo- 1 Mr. Lazarethas since escaped from Siberia and is now in Milwaukee, Wis. ADVENTURES IN EASTERN SIBERIA 337 dious Russian romance; sometimes Mr. Frost and I gavethe exiles a spirited if not a finished rendering of Bingo,The Bull-dog, Solomon Levi, or some other rollickingcollege melody: and sometimes we all sang in chorus the 8 H ►9O - 0D -i. stirring words and music of the Little Russian Marseillaise,the quasi-revolutionary and prohibited song On the Volgathere is a Cliff, or the martial strains of John Brown. Sooner or later, however, we invariably reverted to thetopics that most interested us all—the condition of Russia,II 22 338 SIBERIA the Russian revolutionary movement, and the life of politi-cal exiles in prison, on the road, or at the mines. Here Iobtained many of the facts that I have set forth in previouschapters, and here I heard, for the first time, the terriblehistory of the Kharkof central prison, and the narrative ofthe desperate hunger-strike of the f our women in the prisonat Stories more ghastly and pathetic I had neverread nor imagined; and night after night I went back to thehotel in a state of emotional excitement that made it im-possible for me to sleep, and equally impossible to turn mythoughts into any other channel. All that I could do wasto lie for hours
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