The Vermont watchman. [volume] (Montpelier, Vt.) 1883-1911, 1888-10-10
Sn General.
A Reception of the Exiles.

The prisoners had disembarked be-
fore we reached our destination. We
found them assembled in two dense
gray throngs at the ends of long
wooden shed, which was surrounded
and turned into sort of cattle-pen by
a high plank wall Here they were
identified, counted, and turned over by
the convoy officer to the warden of the
Tomsk forwarding prison. The shed
was divided transverseiy through the
middle by low wooden barricade, at
one end of which was fenced enclos-
ure, about ten feet square, for the ac-
commodation of the officers who had to
take part in the reception of the party.
About half the eXiles had been form
ally received" and were standing at
the eastern end of the shed, while the
other half were grouped in a dense
throng at the western end, waiting for
their names to be called. The women,
who stood huddled together in a group
by themselves, were mostly in peasant
costumes, with bright-colored kerchiefs
over their heads, and their faces,
thought, showed great anxiety and APP
prehension. The men all wore long
gray overcoats over coarse linen shirts
and trousers; most of them were in
chains, and the bare heads of the con-
vcts and the penal colonists had been
half shaved longitudinally in such a
way that one side of the scalp was
smooth and blue, while the other side
was hidden by long-negected hair.
Soldiers stood here and there around
the shed, leaning upon their bayoneted
rifles, and inside the little Enclosure
were the convoy officer of the party,
the warden and the surgeon of the
Tomsk forwarding prison, the chief of
the local bureau of exile administration,
and two or three other officers, all in
full uniform. Colonel Yagodkin intro
duced us as American travellers who de-
sired to see the reception of an exile
party, and we were invited to stand in
side the Enclosure. The officer who was
conducting the examination of the con-
victs drew folded paper from a large
bundle in his hand, opened and glanced
at it, and then shouted, " Nikolai Kolt-
sof!'' A thin, pale man, with heavy,
wearied eyes and hopeless expression
of face, who was standing in the front
rank of the exile party, picked up the
gray linen bag that lay beside him on
the floor, and with slow clink, clink,
clink of chains, walked to the Enclosure.
The examining officer compared his
| face carefully with a photograph at
tached to the &" stateini speesok," or
" identification paper" in order to
make sure that the pale man had not
exchanged names" with some other
exile, while a Cossack orderly exam
ined him from head to foot and rum
mayed through his bag to see that he
had neither lost nor surreptitiously sold
the articles of clothing that he had re-
ceived in Moscow or Tiumen, and that
his stateni speesok" called for. is
everything there?" inquired the officer.
Everything" replied the Cossack.
" Stoopai" re- Pass onr'] said the lieu
tenant; and the pale-faced man Shout
dered his bag and joined the ranks of
the received at the eastern end of
the shed. "The photographs are a new
thing" whispered Colonel Yagodkin to
me- " and only part of the eXiles have
them. They are intended to break up
the practice of exchanging names and
Identities" 9 But why should they
wish to exchange names and identi-
ties?" inquired. "If man is SEN
fenced to hard labor at the Mines" he
replied, ''and has a little money, he al
ways tries to buy secretly the name and
identity of some poor devil of a colonist
who longs desperately for a drink of
vodka, or who wants money with which
to gamble. OF course the convoy Off
Ger has no means of preventing this
sort of transaction, because he can not
possibly remember the names and
faces of the four or five hundred men
in his party. If the convict succeeds
in finding a colonist who is willing to
sell his name, he takes the colonists
place and is assigned a residence in
some village, while the colonist takes
the convict's place and goes to the
mines. Hundreds of hard-labor con-
victs escape in this way."-George Ken
nan, IN October Century.