bered rows and columns. I had never before had occasion to see with my ears, but I found it quite possible to do so, and I have no doubt that by making proper use of a scratcher and the knock alphabet a mathematician might give a lesson in plane geometry through a ten-inch wall.

As soon as my instructor completed his invisible but audible checkerboard he rapped out the words: "Put alphabet in squares."

This I succeeded in doing by scratching the diagram on the floor with a nail which I found driven into the woodwork behind the door. The man in the other cell then began knocking again, but, instead of designating a letter by its serial number in the alphabet, he located it on the checkerboard square by giving the number of the row and the number of the column at whose intersection it would be found. I don't know who originally invented this device, but it reduces by at least seventy per cent the number of knocks required. To make the vowel "u" by the first method one must knock twenty-one times, but the same letter may be indicated on the checkerboard square with six knocks. In learning this code, the beginner must have the diagram before him, because he has to refer to it constantly; but after he has memorized the numerical value of the letters he can wholly dispense with it, because he no longer needs its guidance. Every group of knocks then has its alphabetical equivalent in his brain, and the translation is made almost without conscious effort. After a few days' practice one can easily knock out from eight to twelve words a minute, and this rate of speed may be greatly increased by abbreviations in spelling.

The first question asked by my instructor after I had learned the square was:

Who are you?”

I gave my name. "From the gentry?" Yes."

"I thought so; all of our brothers" (i. c., all of our kind) "know the square. Rapping to you was like offering nuts to a toothless squirrel. I thought you'd never twig. What are you in for ?"

"Probably for something I've written; I'm a political."

"Ah! Politicheski! I know your kind. They're not a bad lot, but they all write too much. There were two politicals in my party when I went to Siberia, and one of them was a writer. In our motherland writ

The very first," I replied.

"Then I can teach you many useful things. I'm only a mushik-educated with copper money-but I know jails as the tongue knows the mouth."

My fellow-prisoner did not overestimate his capabilities as an instructor. In the course of the next two weeks we became fairly intimate, and when I had gained his confidence he did not hesitate to share with me the extraordinary fund of knowledge and experience that he had acquired in perhaps a hundred different jails, ostrogs, forwarding prisons, and étapes. He taught me three or four ingenious ciphers; described to me methods of intercommunication between cells by means of stoves, gas fixtures, bread pills, pendulums, and the New Testament; told me how to hide small objects so that the turnkeys would not find them in a search; and impressed upon my mind the importance. in prison life of the apparently insignificant things that a man may find and pick up in the courtyard when he is taken out for his walk, such as buttons, pins, old nails, bits of string, pieces of glass, and even half-burned matches and the ends of cigarettes.

"You can't rap long, nor make a clear sound," he said, "with your knuckles. You must have a knocker, and a button or a nail is good. Hide it in the hot-air hole of your stove, or keep it in your mouth when you are searched. With a pin, or the burned end of a match, and a scrap of cigarette paper, you've got writing materials. Hide them in the toe of your shoe. Look everywhere, notice everything, save everything,

1 Kiev is a place of pilgrimage; Schlusselburg is a fortress prison for political convicts.-G. K.

Common criminals who escape from prison or exile and become tramps usually call themselves" Ivan Nameless" or " Ivan Dontremember " when they are rearrested, hoping thus to conceal their identities and their records. Hundreds of these "Ivans" are registered in the books of the police every year. They are known as "brodyags," and are flogged and sent to Siberia every time they escape and are recaptured.-G. K.

and listen for all noises. If there's a Bible in your cell, look for pin-holes in the leaves."

In short, my friend the brodyag gave me a full course of instruction in the only branch of knowledge that is studied in our prisons, viz., the art of outwitting jailers. Nothing, however, that I learned from him was more useful to me than the checkerboard square. With a knowledge of that diagram, a prisoner can seldom be wholly isolated, even in a bomb-proof casemate. He may be, as you said, "the only inhabitant of his world," but by means of the knock alphabet he can enter into mental and emotional relations with the inhabitants of other similar worlds around him, and may thus keep his faculties and sympathies alive through months and even years of solitude and loneliness.

I was transferred to the fortress early in August. Two gendarmes came to my cell in the middle of the night, waked me, ordered me to dress, and then took me downstairs to a closed and curtained carriage which was waiting for us in the street. When I asked where we were going, they replied, in the words that I was to hear so often in the months to come, "Prikazano ne govoreet" (The orders are not to talk). I had little doubt that our destination was the fortress, and when, after we had crossed a long bridge and turned a corner, I heard the hollow echo of the horses' feet from the sides and roof of a vaulted passage, I knew that we were entering one of the courtyards of our dreaded political prison. In front of a sentinel-guarded door the gendarmes turned me over to a warden and two soldiers, who took me through a long, dimly lighted corridor to cell No. 58. After I had put on the fortress dress-coarse undershirt and drawers, felt slippers, and a long loose khalat-the jailers retired, and I was left alone to acquaint myself with my new and strange environment.

Although I was young, strong, and temperamentally buoyant, the cell in which I found myself chilled me with a feeling of foreboding and dread. It was large and high, because it had been built to hold a heavy cannon; but the walls were black, cold, and damp; the heavily grated window was eight feet or more above the floor, and the gloominess and stillness suggested a burial vault rather than a prison cell or even a casemate. The only articles of furniture in the room were the ordinary Russian stove of plastered brick; a narrow iron bed, one end

of which was fastened to the wall with bolts ; a shelf-like iron table, secured in the same way; a wooden commode with a hinged door; and a wash-basin, into which the guard in the corridor could pour water through a tube. Light was furnished by a small kerosene lamp of brass, which my jailers had left on the table at the head of the bed when they retired.

After examining carefully every object in the cell (in accordance with the counsel of my friend the brodyag). I listened attentively for some sound of human life or activity; but the silence was that of a sepulcher. Suddenly I became conscious of two human eyes staring at me from a narrow slit in the heavy plank door. As I took a step toward them they vanished, and with a faint click the hinged cover of the peep-hole dropped into its place. The consciousness that vigilant, impersonal, and apparently disembodied eyes were constantly watching me-as if I were an insect under a microscope-took away the only comfort there was in solitude. Aloneness I could endure, but secret, stealthy surveillance, in addition to loneliness, was intolerable. "However," I thought, "darkness will shelter me from that," and, stepping to the table, I blew out the light. In a few minutes the key grated in the rusty lock, the door opened, and a soldier entered with another lighted lamp.

"Putting out the light is not allowed," he said; "and if you do it again, we'll put you in a place where it will be dark all the time."

I made no reply, but when he had gone I set the lamp on the floor, in the farthest corner of the cell, and threw myself on the bed. Slowly and mournfully, at the quarter-hour, the bells in the spire of the fortress cathedral chimed out the air of the liturgical response, "Haye mercy, O Lord!"

I fell asleep at last, but the eyes at the slit of the "judas" and the faint, far-away chiming of church melodies gave form and color to a vivid dream in which I imagined that I had fallen into a death-like trance and was about to be buried. The priest who was conducting the funeral service looked into my coffin through a slit in the lid and saw with comprehending eyes that I was alive; but, turning away indifferently, he gave the signal for lowering my body into the grave, and then, seizing a handful of earth, he sprinkled it over me while he intoned in a deep bass voice, "The earth is the Lord's, and the fullness thereof, and the

wide world and all that dwell therein."1 With the sound of the sprinkled earth in my ears I awoke. The lamp was still burning, but the gray light of dawn was coming in through the high-grated embrasure.

My first day in the fortress was typical of innumerable days to come. Three times, at intervals of four or five hours, a silent soldier handed food to me through a square porthole in the heavy plank door. As knives and forks had been used by desperate or insane prisoners as a means of committing suicide, they were not furnished—at least not to me. Solids, such as bread and meat, were cut into slices or mouthfuls which could be eaten from the hand, and for soup and porridge there was provided a wooden spoon. Twice every hour, on an average, a turnkey in the corridor looked through the slit in the door to see what I was doing; but as he was shod in felt slippers there was no sound of footsteps to warn me of his approach. The grave-like stillness of the casemate was never broken save by the faint, distant chiming of the quarter-hours in the belfry of the fortress cathedral and the firing of a heavy gun on the parapet at noon. All through the first day of my incarceration I watched the narrow strip of sky that I could see through the high window, with the hope that the sun would cross it; but it never did. The window opening was a tunnel through five feet of masonry, and not a ray of sunshine could get into it. Late in the afternoon there was a reflection from the high encircling wall of the courtyard, which brightened for a time. the gloomy atmosphere of the cell; but it did not last long. During most of the day I sat in a gray twilight which was like that of a crypt.

My first thought, after I became accustomed to my environment, was that of opening communication by means of the knock alphabet with possible neighbors in adjoining cells; but it was neither so safe nor so easy to do this in the fortress as it had been in the Litovski Zamok. There the walls were thin and the guards negligent or indifferent; but here there might be two feet of masonry between me and the occupant of the next cell, and the watchful eyes at the slit of the “judas” made it difficult to knock without being seen. However, I determined to try. Seating myself at the head of the bed, I

The equivalent. in the Russian service, of the words, Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust in the English Book of Common Prayer.-G. K.

buried my face in my crossed arms on the little table, and out of the corners of nearly closed eyes watched the peep-hole in the door. Presently its hinged cover rose and the guard looked into the cell. Seeing nothing suspicious in my attitude, he closed the aperture and went on to the next casemate, while I began knocking with my knuckles under cover of my knee. There was no response. After waiting a moment I knocked again, and then, laying my ear to the wall, listened with concentrated attention. All that I could hear was the beating of my heart. A dozen times that day, in the comparatively safe intervals between the visits of the guard to my door, I rapped first on one side wall and then on the other; but never was there an answering knock. Either the cells next to mine were unoccupied or the occupants did not hear my signals.

At the end of the third day I became satisfied that I was absolutely isolated. The brodyag in the Litovski Zamok had assured me, out of his wide experience, that intercommunication between cells was always possible in one way or another; but he had never been in the fortress. That labyrinth of stonewalled corridors and casemates was an exception to all prison rules and would have defied perhaps even his ingenuity and resourcefulness. I certainly could think of no possible way of connecting my world with any other world. So far as social relations were concerned I might as well have been shut up alone in a chamber of the Catacombs, because the guard who handed me food through the twelveinch port-hole would not talk, and the eyes which appeared every half-hour at the "judas" slit in the door never gave me a sense of human association, much less of sympathetic human companionship.

It was the policy of the Government at that time to shake the courage and break down the resolution of newly arrested political offenders by subjecting them for long periods to the depressing influences of solitude, stillness, and gloom. It was thought that when a man had been virtually buried alive for a month or two he would be more inclined to make full confession, or at least that he would be less able to hold his mental grip under a browbeating and terrifying examination. For this reason everything was done-particularly at first-to make the conditions of imprisonment as trying as possible to mind and nerves. General Strelnikof even put metallic hoods over the windows of prison

cells, in order to deprive the occupants of the cheer and comfort that they might get from sunshine. In the fortress, however, this was not necessary, as the light which came in through the high tunnels of the half-walledup embrasures was dim and feeble at best.

The first break in the monotony of my life came about a month after my incarceration, when I was taken to the gloomy chamber of the Corps de Garde for examination. An official in blue uniform whom I did not know asked me a great number of questions with regard to my political activity, my associates, and the work in the pressroom of my paper, where, evidently, the police thought revolutionary literature had been printed. As I refused to answer most of these questions, I was taken back to my cell, with the warning that if I continued to maintain this obstinate attitude I might be condemned to penal servitude.

Then began what seemed to me an eternity of loneliness, solitude, stillness, and gloom. Once a day a soldier entered the casemate to change the drawer of the commode; three times a day another handed me food through the port-hole; and once a month a third came with scissors to cut my hair and nails; but none of these men would talk, or allow me to talk, and they were changed so often from corridor to corridor and from bastion to ravelin that I seldom saw the same face twice. Their visits, however, were the events of my life; and in the intervals between them I had nothing to do but think, pace my cell, listen to the faint, mournful chiming of the cathedral bells, and watch apprehensively for the appearance of the expressionless eyes at the slit of the "judas," which, every time I encountered them unexpectedly, gave me a slight nervous shock.

The greatest danger of solitary confinement under such conditions is that of sinking into a mind-unbalancing melancholia; and against this danger I endeavored to guard by inventing occupations for mind and hands. The first thing I tried was saving a part of my daily ration of bread, moistening it in my mouth, and then molding it into figures. This promised well, and I thought it might even be possible to make a few chessmen, with which I could think out openings and endings and contrive problems. I soon discovered, however, that this form of activity was prohibited. On the second or third day the eyes at the peep-hole happened to notice what I was doing, and a few moments later

a warden entered the casemate, took away my figures, and threatened me with the dark cell. Then I tried unraveling one of my stockings in order to get yarn with which I could invent knots and practice tying them. This, too, was soon discovered and forbidden. I was finally reduced to menta arithmetic and the composition and memorization of newspaper editorials; but these exercises were fatiguing and did not satisfy my craving for occupation and diversion.

The longing for some familiar sound to break the eternal silence led me one day to try talking aloud to myself; but this also proved to be a violation of prison rules, and all that I could do, when the stillness became intolerable, was to hiccough artificially or cough. For three months the only sounds I heard were infrequent orders in a low tone from the generally silent soldiers of the guard, the dull boom of the noon gun from the parapet, and the chiming of "Have mercy, O Lord!" "How Glorious is Our Lord in Zion!" and "God Save the Czar!" from the belfry of the fortress cathedral. I continued to rap on the side walls with my knuckles every three or four days, with a faint hope that a prisoner might have been put into one of the adjoining cells during the night; but I never got a response. And yet the saying of the brodyag that intercommunication between cells is always possible proved at last to be true.

When winter came on, and my health began to fail so noticeably as to attract the attention of the guard, I was taken out to walk for fifteen or twenty minutes every day in the walled courtyard. Presuming that other prisoners were taken there, one by one, at other times, and remembering the instructions of the brodyag in the Litovski Zamok, I scrutinized closely every square foot of ground over which I passed, and on the second or third day I noticed, picked up, and transferred to my mouth unobserved an object that looked like a small gray marble. When I had been taken back to my cell and the guard had gone, I examined it, and found it to be a frozen sphere of bread. As soon as it thawed out I opened it and discovered a crumpled bit of cigarette paper in which groups of holes had been pricked with a pin. The holes were numerically equivalent to the letters "b-l-o-k" in the checkerboard square, and Blok was the name of one of my classmates in the university. I had lost sight of him after our graduation, and did not know