many miseries of life in such a place. This completely broke down the wife's fortitude. She went to her husband, convulsed with sobs, and told him that she would send her child to European Russia, or leave it with friends in Minusínsk, but go with him to Túrukhánsk she must and should—to let him go there alone was beyond her strength. "After this," said Prince Kropótkin, "there was nothing for me to do but put a pistol to my head, or yield, and I yielded. I went to the police office, and continued to report there as long as I remained in Minusínsk."
I have related this incident in Prince Kropótkin's Siberian life partly because it seems to have first suggested suicide to him as a means of escape from an intolerable position, and partly because it is in many ways an index to his character. He was extremely sensitive, proud, and high-spirited, and often made a fight upon some point which a cooler, more philosophic man would have taken as one of the natural incidents of his situation.
About two years ago Prince Kropótkin was transferred from Minusínsk to Tomsk, a change which brought him a few hundred miles nearer to European Russia, but which in other respects was not perhaps a desirable one. When I saw him in February he was living simply but comfortably in a rather spacious log house, ten minutes' drive from the European Hotel, and was devoting himself to literary pursuits. He had a good working library of two or three hundred volumes, among which I noticed the astronomical works of Professors Newcomb and Holden, Stallo's "Concepts of Science," of which he expressed a very high opinion, several volumes of "Smithsonian Reports," and forty or fifty other American books. His favorite study was astronomy, and in this branch of science he would probably have distinguished himself under more favorable circumstances. After his exile, however, he was not only deprived of instruments, but had great difficulty in obtaining books; his private correspondence was under control, and he was more
