prison, while the authorities were investigating her story, and was then sent back to Mínusínsk. In the meantime her aged father and mother had succeeded in obtaining from friends money enough to get as far south as Moscow, and when the unfortunate daughter passed through that city on her way to Eastern Siberia, her parents and sisters, whom she had hoped to help, came to see her in prison and were permitted to have a brief interview with her. Véra subsequently married, in Mínusínsk, the talented young author, publicist, and political exile, Iván Petróvich Belokónski, and lived there with him until the termination of her period of banishment. She then returned to European Russia in order that she might help take care of her aged father, who had gone insane, and her feeble and almost heart-broken mother. At the time when we left Siberia, she, herself, was living with her parents in the city of Kiev, her exiled husband was more than three thousand miles away in Mínusínsk, and her exiled sister was more than four thousand miles away on the head-waters of the river Léna.
To one who lives in a country where personal rights are secured by all sorts of legal and constitutional guarantees, it may seem, perhaps, that nothing could be more unjust and tyrannical than the banishment of an infirm father, an aged mother, and two helpless children, merely because certain other members of the family had become disloyal; but in the history of administrative exile in Russia there are things even more extraordinary and unreasonable than this.
Towards the close of the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-1878, when the conspicuous gallantry of General Skóbelef had attracted to him the attention of the world, and had made him the idol of enthusiastic young men throughout Russia, a large number of students in the university of Kiev undertook to give formal expression to their feeling of admiration for the great popular hero by getting up an address to him. There happened, at that time, to be more or less
