stout, chubby-faced young officer, named Ivanénko, soon made his appearance, and we were admitted to the prison yard. Within the spacious inclosure stood twelve or fifteen one-story log buildings, grouped without much apparent regularity about a square log church. At the doors of most of these buildings stood armed sentries, and in the unpaved streets or open spaces between them were walking or sitting on the bare ground hundreds of convicts and penal colonists, who, in chains and leg-fetters, were taking their daily outing. The log buildings with their grated windows, the high stockade which surrounded them, the armed sentries here and there, and the throngs of convicts who in long, gray, semi-military overcoats roamed aimlessly about the yard, would doubtless have reminded many a Union soldier of the famous prison pen at Andersonville. The prison buildings proper were long, one-story, barrack-like houses of squared logs, with board roofs, heavily grated windows, and massive wooden doors secured by iron padlocks. Each separate building constituted a kazárm, or prison ward, and each ward was divided into two large kámeras, or cells, by a short hall running transversely through the middle. There were eight of these kazárms, or log prisons, and each of them was designed to accommodate 190 men, with an allowance of eight-tenths of a cubic fathom of air space per capita.[1] They were all substantially alike, and seemed to me to be about 75 feet long by 40 feet wide, with a height of 12 feet between floors and ceilings. The first kámera that we examined was perhaps 40 feet square, and contained about 150 prisoners. It was fairly well lighted, but its atmosphere was polluted to the last degree by over-respiration, and its temperature, raised by the natural heat of the pris-
- ↑ The report of the inspector of exile transportation for 1884 says that the Tomsk prison contains ten of these kazárms. The warden told me that there were only eight. Accounts also differ as to the normal capacity of the prison. Acting-Governor Petukhóf said that it was originally intended to hold 1400 prisoners, while the inspector of exile transportation reported in 1884 that its normal capacity was 1900. It contained, at the time of our visit, about 3500.
