Mr. Enderton gave a great sniff, and walked away with dignity. I could not but laugh as I imagined his condition two minutes after he had stated his opinions on this subject to Mrs. Lecks.

When Mr. Dusante had started from San Francisco on his search for us he had sent his heavy baggage ahead of him to Ogden City, where he purposed to make his first stop. He supposed that we might possibly here diverge from our homeward route in order to visit the Mormon metropolis; and, if we had done so, he did not wish to pass us. It was therefore now agreed that we should all go to Ogden City, and there await the arrival of our effects left in the snowed-up vehicles on the mountain-side. We made arrangements with the station-master that these should be forwarded to us as soon as the stage-coach and the carriage could be brought down. All the baggage of my party was on the coach, and it consisted only of a few valises bought in San Francisco, and a package containing two life-preservers, which Mrs. Lecks and Mrs. Aleshine said they would take home with them, if they took nothing else.

On the morning after our arrival at Ogden City, Mr. Dusante took me aside. "Sir," he said, "I wish to confide to you my intentions regarding the jar containing the money left by your party in my house, and I trust you will do nothing to thwart them. When your baggage arrives, you, with your party, will doubtless continue your eastern way, and we shall return to San Francisco. But the jar, with its contents, shall be left behind to be delivered to Mrs. Lecks. If you will take charge of the jar and hand it to her, sir, I shall be obliged greatly."

I promised Mr. Dusante that I would not interfere with his intentions, but asserted that I could, on no account, take charge of the jar. The possession of that piece of pottery, with its contents, was now a matter of dispute between him and Mrs. Lecks, and must be settled by them.

"Very well, then, sir," he said. "I shall arrange to depart before you and your company, and I shall leave the jar, suitably packed, in the care of the clerk of this hotel, with directions to hand it to Mrs. Lecks after I am gone. Thus there will be nothing for her to do but to receive it."

Some one now came into the smoking-room, where we were sitting, and no more was said

his intention very much amused me, for Mrs. Lecks had previously taken me into her confidence in regard to her intentions in this matter. "Mr. Dusante," she had said, “has n't dropped a word more about the money in that ginger-jar, but I know just as well as he does what he is goin' to do about it. When the time comes to go, he's goin' to slip off quietly, leavin' that jar behind him, thinkin' then I'll be obliged to take it, there bein' nobody to give it back to. But he 'll find me just as sharp as he is. I've got the street and number of his business place in Honolulu from his sister,- askin' about it in an off-hand way, as if it did n't mean anythin',-an if that jar is left for me, I'll pack it in a box, money and all, and I'll express it to Mr. Dusante; and when he gets to Honolulu he'll find it there, and then he 'll know that two can play at that sort of game."

Knowing Mr. Dusante, and knowing Mrs. Lecks, I pictured to myself a box containing a ginger-jar, and covered with numerous halfobliterated addresses, traveling backward and forward between the Sandwich Islands and Pennsylvania during the lifetime of the contestants, and, probably, if testamentary desire should be regarded, during a great part of the lifetime of their heirs. That the wear and tear of the box might make it necessary to inclose it in a keg, and that, eventually, the keg might have to be placed in a barrel, and that, after a time, in a hogshead, seemed to me as likely as any other contingencies which might befall this peregrinating ginger-jar.

We spent three days in Ogden City, and then, the weather having moderated very much, and the snow on the mountains having melted sufficiently to allow the vehicles to be brought down, our effects were forwarded to us, and my party and that of Mr. Dusante prepared to proceed on our different ways. An eastwardbound train left that evening an hour after we received our baggage, but we did not care to depart upon such short notice, and so determined to remain until the next day.

In the evening Mr. Dusante came to me to say that he was very glad to find that the westward train would leave Ogden City early in the morning, so that he and his family would start on their journey some hours before we left. "This suits my plans exactly," he said. "I have left the ginger-jar, securely wrapped, and addressed to Mrs. Lecks, with the clerk of the hotel, who will deliver it tomorrow immediately after my departure. All our preparations are made, and we purpose this evening to bid farewell to you and our other kind friends, from whom, I assure you, we are most deeply grieved to part."

The evils complained of were evidently too deeply-rooted and had existed too long to be eradicated by Ministerial circulars, however mandatory their tone.

In 1879 the Ministry of the Interior sent still another letter to provincial governors, based on a report from Senator Grote calling attention once more to the glaring defects of the prison system, and urging the adoption of measures to remedy them and to secure a more rigid enforcement of the laws.*

Most of the circular letters above cited related to disorders which were the direct result of bad management and incompetent supervision; but coincident with them there was issued another series, devoted more particularly to the overcrowding and bad sanitary condition of the prison buildings. From the letters comprised in this latter series it appears that "most of the prisons of the empire" were overcrowded, many of them containing twice or three times the number of prisoners for which they were intended. ‡ In a report made by the Chief of the Central Prison Administration to the Minister of the Interior in 1883, it was stated that in the province of Sedlets there were 484 persons in a prison intended for 207; in the province of Suvalki there were 433 in a prison built for 165; and in the province of Petrokof there were 652 in a prison designed for 125. In the annual report of the Central Prison Administration for 1882 it was admitted that there was not a prison in the empire which afforded its occupants one cubic fathom of air space per capita; § that in more than half the prisons the per capita air space was little more than a third of a cubic fathom, and that in some cases the overcrowding went to such an extent as to reduce the per capita air space to one-fifth of a cubic fathom. In other words, there were prisons where five human beings lived together and tried to breathe, in a volume of air which might have been contained in a packing-box seven feet square and seven feet high. ||

Much of this overcrowding is due to the slowness of judicial procedure in Russia, and still more, perhaps, is attributable to the provision of law which makes it a criminal offense to be without a passport or to allow one's passport to lapse. In some parts of the empire

* Circular letter No. 33, March 6th, 1879. Thirteen such letters were sent to provincial gov. ernors between 1859 and 1879, besides seventeen other circular letters aimed at specific abuses.

‡ Circular letters No. 9650, Nov. 5th, 1864; No. 33, March 6th, 1879; No. 4560, Nov. 28th, 1879; and No. 8, April 6th, 1883.

The Russian fathom is seven English feet. Abstract of the Report of the Central Prison Administration for 1882. Newspaper "Sibir," May 1st, 1883.

twenty-five and even thirty per cent. of the so-called "criminals" in the jails are mere vagrants and "bezpassportni "-persons not provided with the papers necessary to prove their identity.¶

792,933 persons were received into the prisons of the empire in 1884 and 698,418 were discharged therefrom, leaving 94,515 in prison on the first of January, 1885. Of this last number 26,307 were awaiting trial. **

It further appears from the series of circular letters above referred to, that in many prisons women were not adequately separated from the men, and male overseers were allowed to search the persons of female prisoners; tt officials took bribes from the criminals in their custody and furnished them secretly with intoxicating liquor; # the sanitary condition of the prison buildings was almost everywhere bad, the wells being poisoned by leakage from neglected and improperly constructed privies, and the air in the overcrowded cells being polluted and rendered unfit for respiration by miasmatic exhalations from the same sources; §§ the prison hospitals were in an “extremely unsatisfactory condition," and many of them were so small and so ill provided with medicines as to be of little use to the sick; |||| and the hospital officers sometimes neglected their duties to such an extent as to render themselves liable to criminal prosecution. In one case, cited by the Minister of the Interior as an illustration, a prison surgeon in a provincial town, wishing to get rid of a troublesome patient who had been left there sick by a passing criminal party, ordered the man to be sent forward to his destination, notwithstanding the fact that he was in a dying condition. The unfortunate prisoner lived only long enough to reach the first etape, fifteen or twenty miles away.¶¶

The condition of the provincial prisons, as it appears from these circulars, is, to adopt the words of the Minister of the Interior, "an extremely unsatisfactory " one; but the picture thus outlined still falls far short of a full and true representation of the real state of affairs. Prison inspectors like Baron Velio and State Councilor Kossagofski necessarily see the penal institutions of the empire at their best. The provincial governors and the prison officials

are always forewarned of their coming and have ample time to put the prisons into a temporary and deceptive state of comparative order; the inspection is generally a formal and perfunctory one, taking note only of irregularities and abuses which, to use a Russian expression, "throw themselves into the eyes"; and, finally, the stereotyped phrases," violation of law," "extremely unsatisfactory condition," and so forth, in which the results of the inspection are set forth by the Minister of the Interior, convey to the mind of the reader no definite idea of the state of facts to which such euphemistic expressions refer.

A RUSSIAN PRISON AND ITS LIFE.

WITHOUT, however, going behind official sources of information, it is possible to obtain a much clearer view of Russian prison life than that afforded by ministerial circulars. Now and then a fearless and honest prison official, shocked by the disorder, wretchedness, and misery which he is forced to witness but is powerless to remedy, and convinced of the futility of formal report and remonstrance, prints in some Russian periodical as much of the results of his prison experience as the censor will allow him to print. In 1885 Mr. I. Reve, an official connected with a provincial prison in one of the northern provinces of European Russia, published in the "Juridical Messenger," the organ of the Moscow Bar Association, two long and carefully prepared papers entitled "A Russian Prison and its Life," in which there is drawn a much darker picture of prison disorder and demoralization than that outlined in the ministerial circulars above cited. The author does not hesitate to assert that the laws which are supposed to regulate Russian prisons bear hardly a semblance of relation to the real facts of prison life. "Nine-tenths of such laws," he says, "are not enforced at all, and the remaining tenth is enforced in a way very different from that which the statutes themselves contemplate." He recites at length the regulations for the government of prisons contained in the fourteenth volume of the Russian collection of laws, and shows that in the prison to which his observations relate hardly a pretense was made of observing any one of them. And this, he maintains, is not a state of affairs which exists in a single prison only, but a state of affairs which, with slight and inconsiderable variations, prevails everywhere. In 1880 the prison described by Mr. Reve was, he says, "a little tsardom, where the highest law was the will of the warden, and where the superior officials of the province either did not dare or did not care to show their faces." The procureur, who was required by law to visit the

prison every Friday, came thither once or twice a year. The prison surgeon paid no attention whatever to the sanitary condition of the buildings, nor to the food, clothing, or habits of the prisoners, but contented himself with visiting the hospital for a few moments once a week. The priest, whose duty it was to go to the prison "not less than twice a week," for the purpose of instructing ignorant prisoners and ministering to the spiritual welfare of the whole prison population, did not appear there at all. The prison workshop was in chaotic disorder, and the prisoners, instead of working in it, spent a large part of their time in smoking, gambling, quarreling, or fighting. Hardly a pretense was made of feeding them decently or regularly; but as most of them were allowed to wander about the town and seek work during the day-time they earned money enough to feed themselves, and shared the remainder of their wages with the warden who allowed them the privilege. The trade in intoxicating liquor was an organized system, and the warden himself set the example of drunkenness. Disciplinary punishment was inflicted at his caprice, and he executed his own sentences by beating the prisoners in the face with his fists. The prison committee, which should have supervised and controlled the whole domestic economy of the prison, was absolutely dead and inert. "It was not," Mr. Reve says, "a living institution, but a mere bureaucratic fiction."

It seems almost incredible that such a state of things as this should have been allowed to exist in any prison in European Russia, but the statements of fact are made by an official over his own signature, and the articles were printed in the most influential legal journal of the empire, presumably with the consent of the Moscow censorial committee. It must not be inferred, however, that no attempt was made by the higher authorities of the province to remedy the evils above set forth. Such attempts were made, but as they had their origin in official caprice rather than in a serious determination to enforce the existing laws, their results were far from satisfactory. Every official who stands at the head of a provincial government has his own peculiar character and his own peculiar views, and such character and views are reflected in the administration of prison affairs within the limits of his province. As the result of successive changes of provincial governors, the prison above described had, between 1880 and 1885, three different wardens and was subjected to five abrupt and radical changes of administrative policy. "What can be expected," Mr. Reve asks, "under such circumstances, except complete disorder and disorganization? A prison