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life is the method by which the politicals convey secret intelligence to their relatives and friends in open letters forwarded through official hands. When a political offender has been subjected to final examination and the papers in his case are ready for submission to the Department of Justice, he is generally allowed to exchange letters with his relatives. All such letters, however, must be sent to the procureur or the local chief of gendarmes for examination, and they are not only carefully scrutinized, but are often subjected to heat and to the action of chemical re-agents, in order to ascertain whether or not they contain invisible writing in sympathetic ink. In spite, however, of such measures of precaution, the political prisoners manage, with the aid of the checker-board cipher, to transmit contraband information through the hands and under the very eyes of the most subtle and experienced officials. As an illustration of the way in which this is accomplished, take the following extract from the letter of a prisoner:

word-spaces is obviated by a rule that such spaces shall be disregarded unless the final stroke of the terminal letter is upward, as in the word "of" in the first line of the foregoing illustration. That sign indicates that the wordspace which follows it is also a cipher-space and is to be taken into account in determining the limits of the cipher-groups. This method of conveying information is now known to the "cipher bureau" of the gendarmerie, but for a long time it was practiced successfully, and it is still resorted to occasionally in remote provincial prisons.

Nothing has done more than this sort of intercommunication to prevent suicide and insanity among political prisoners in solitary confinement. Complete isolation is perhaps the most terrible punishment that can be inflicted upon an educated human being, and when to such isolation are added perfect stillness, limitation of vision by four bare walls, and deprivation of all means of employment for the intellectual powers, life soon becomes

I have received
The nineteenth instant and am very glad

your welcome letter of

to learn from it that

you

are all well at

home and that you received safely the

letter which I wrote

you

on the twenty third last month. I wish I could hear from you oftener.

of

There is apparently nothing unusual or suspicious either in the language or in the chirography of this letter, it would probably be approved and passed by nine officials out of ten,- and yet it contains the words, "Tell Alexe to fly - arrest threatened." A close and careful examination of the writing will show that the letters are segregated into groups by minute and almost imperceptible spaces. The first words are spaced as follows: "Ihaverece-i-vedyo-urw-el-com-el." The number of letters in each group is regarded as a figure and every two figures constitute a number, whose alphabetical equivalent is to be found in the cipher square. The numbers in the above groups are 45 15 32 32, which the checkerboard resolves into the letters, "T-e-l-l." The embarrassment which would be caused by the

unendurable and the prisoner either commits suicide, goes insane, or sinks into an apathetic stupor which terminates in dementia. The possibility of intercommunication-of sharing one's thoughts and emotions with another — lends some interest even to the dreariest existence, and the contrivance of schemes to baffle official vigilance and secure such intercommunication affords the mental faculties exercise enough to keep them from decay. Scores of political offenders have gone insane in Russian prisons, but the number of lives thus wrecked is much smaller than it would have been if the imprisoned revolutionists had not contrived, by ingenious methods of intercommunication, to support, encourage, and comfort one another in hours of despair.

George Kennan.

POST-MERIDIAN.

I. AFTERNOON.

THEN in thy glass thou studiest thy face,
Not long, nor yet not seldom, half repelled
And half attracted; when thou hast beheld
Of Time's slow ravages the crumbling trace
(Deciphered now with many an interspace

The characters erewhile that Beauty spelled),
And in thy throat a choking fear hath swelled
Of Love, grown cold, eluding thy embrace:
Could'st thou but read my gaze of tenderness —
Affection fused with pity-precious tears
Would bring relief to thy unjust distress;

Thy visage, even as it to me appears,

Would seem to thee transfigured; thou would'st bless
Me, who am also, Dearest, scarred with years!

II. EVENING.

Age can not wither her whom not gray hairs

Nor furrowed cheeks have made the thrall of Time;
For Spring lies hidden under Winter's rime,
And violets know the victory is theirs.

Even so the corn of Egypt, unawares,

Proud Nilus shelters with engulfing slime;
So Etna's hardening crust a more sublime
Volley of pent-up fires at last prepares.

O face yet fair, if paler, and serene

With sense of duty done without complaint!
O venerable crown!-a living green,
Strength to the weak, and courage to the faint-
Thy bleaching locks, thy wrinkles, have but been
Fresh beads upon the rosary of a saint!

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THE UPPER MISSOURI AND THE GREAT FALLS.

T was a CENTURY expedition in its plan, and its object was to descend the Missouri River in a skiff from some point near Helena, Montana, to the Great Falls, to make a portage around the falls and follow the river down to Fort Benton, and thence, by some sort of land transportation, to cross the country to the Yellowstone through the cattle and sheep ranges. When it came to start from Helena, however, a number of citizens joined it for the purpose of making the trip to the falls, so that there were two skiff-loads instead of one. The pilot, whose old title of colonel had lately been changed to commodore by the Helena newspapers, by reason of his having seven times braved the perils of the rapids and the passage through the Gate of the Mountains, was a man of resources. He had provided but one boat, and, in the free Western fashion, he laid hands upon a small craft that the governor of the Territory had constructed with the view of making a voyage, put it on wheels, and started it for the river in the wake of the larger skiff. The governor was to have gone with the expedition, but was hindered by some public duties. If he could not go his boat could, the commodore reasoned; and go it did, never to return, for there is no such thing as getting up the river with any sort of craft. Now, Helena, where the boats were built, is some twelve miles from the Missouri, and the departure of the expedition was not so impressive an affair as its members might have wished. The appearance of the two skiffs on wheels, loaded with provisions and camp equipage, with the company following, some on foot and some in a "jerky," was by no means heroic. Nevertheless, the people of the town, accustomed to seeing all sorts of queer "outfits," witnessed our departure without any vociferous demonstrations of hilarity, restrained, perhaps, by the blue pennant which the commodore had set up on the prow of his flagship.

The day was the 16th of September, and though the high mountains of the main divide of the Rockies were white with new snow, the oats were not yet harvested on the ranches in the Valley of the Prickly Pear, through which we passed, so late is the maturing of grain in the high latitudes and on the high altitudes of Montana. At Stubbs's Ferry we put the boats into the water. Stubbs seemed

to keep a ferry chiefly for getting his hay across to his barns from his fields on the farther side of the river. There was a road that ran up into the foot-hills of the Belt Range, but no one could tell where it went to or why anybody should travel it. Stubbs's Ferry is about a hundred miles below the junction of the three rivers which form the Missouri — the Jefferson, Madison, and Gallatin. For much of that distance a railroad follows the course of the stream and the banks are sparsely inhabited by ranchmen, but below the ferry the river rushes through a series of profound cañons, and until it gets out of the Belt Range and into the great plains of eastern Montana, the country it traverses is singularly savage and desolate.

In the division of the party between our two boats, the artist and the writer took the smaller one, which had been pirated from the governor, and recruited for its crew a wandering Californian and a Helena journalist. The artist took the steering-oar, reassuring his companions as to his ability to run rapids successfully with the information that in his younger days he had navigated lumber-rafts on the Alleghany River; the writer sat in the bow, to give warning of breakers ahead and shove the boat off when she grounded on shoals; the Californian proved almost a Hanlan at the oars, and the Helena journalist was detailed to work the pumps, which consisted of an old tin can and a cup. The remainder of the party, numbering eight, embarked in the long-boat, and as they had with them the cook, the "grubstake," and the tents, their craft was an object of much interest, about meal-times and at nightfall, to the occupants of the smaller skiff. At other times each of the boats kept its own course, and the skill of the commodore was only required to manage his own craft. By the camp-fire, however, when the day's run was over, the tents were pitched, and the supper was eaten, he came out strong with tales of Indian fights, of Vigilante hangings, and of all manner of wild frontier adventures. He had been through the civil war and numerous Indian campaigns, and carried two bullets in his body. At one time he had held a prominent Federal office in Montana. In later years he has taken a great fancy to the wild rapids and gorges of the Upper Missouri and delights to conduct parties of adventurous travelers through them. The business cannot be profitable, but there is lots of fun in it for the old gentleman; and his bronzed face, sil

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very hair and whiskers, and scarlet handkerchief light up the dark cañons of the river two or three times every season.

In floating down the stream there was a quiet exhilaration which grew upon the travelers as they became accustomed to the moods and ways of the strong green river, and were convinced that it meant no harm when it whirled them around a rocky promontory or swept them swiftly through a seething rapid; convinced, too, that with stout arms and oars they were the masters in any case, and could keep off from half-hidden rocks and away from dangerous shores. The water was clear and cold, and as good to drink as any spring water. VOL. XXXV.-57.

Occasionally there was a little stretch of grassy bottom along one or the other bank, fringed with a thicket of wild-rose bushes, the branches all beaded with coral-red berries; but most of the way huge cliffs of reddish rock or steep mountains, thinly clad with pines, rose abruptly from the water's edge. The strata in the cliffs were bent and twisted in curious ways. Occasionally broad green bands ran through the gray or red rocks, indicating the presence of copper. A solitary ranch was passed the first day of the voyage, and for many miles there was a vestige of former human occupancy in the shape of a long-abandoned flume, that once furnished water for placer-mining. It had cost

a hundred thousand dollars, the commodore When enlisted for THE CENTURY expedition said, and had never paid back the money. he was newly out of jail, a fact that did not Montana, and all the mining Territories, in the least put him out of countenance. He abound in such monuments of misplaced en- regarded himself as a victim of Chinese cheap terprise. The old adage about mining for the labor. When in Missoula, cooking in a hotel, precious metals, that more money is put into he could not get on well with the Chinese asthe ground than is taken out, would probably sistant in the kitchen, and therefore knocked not hold good for universal application, but him down. The landlord took the Chinait fits most mining districts. The solitude and man's part, which so enraged Nick against silence on the river grew oppressive as twi the Mongolian element in general, that he

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light began to fall. There was no sound save the rippling and gurgling of the water. The boat slipped along as quietly as the funeral barge in Tennyson's "Lancelot and Elaine." Weird profiles and masks looked down from the rocky walls. The talk and laughter, and the shouting for echoes, that had made the voyage a merry one so long as the sun shone, had ceased, and there came upon the wanderers a sense of loneliness and mystery, as though they had set out to penetrate an unknown wilderness. It was a relief to all to tie up to the bank at dark, to light a camp-fire, pitch the tents, and unload the boats; and the efforts of the party to eat supper on the ground, in darkness made visible by the flickering fire, were amusing enough to restore good humor all around.

Nick, the cook, was a droll frontier character. For twelve years he had cooked for exploring parties, engineers, and railway builders all the way from Minnesota to Oregon.

rushed into the street and proceeded to run amuck against all the Celestials he met. Before the police could secure him, he had prostrated three or four by vigorous kicks and fisticuffs. He was an amiable fellow in the main, however. His coffee was good, but his views on the Chinese question were a little too aggressive.

The second day's run took the boats through the Gate of the Mountains, a narrow cleft in the Belt Range, through which the river runs at moderate velocity after the preliminary rush of a rapid. The precipices are of grayish rock, about fifteen hundred feet high, and the riven mountains are covered with pines. The sheer cliffs and the warped strata show that the passage has not been worn by the action of the water, but was opened by some great convulsion which tore the solid mountains apart. Very grand and impressive is this deep cañon, but with the bright blue sky above and the sunlight on the pea-green river below, it did not

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