Blandford Weekly News. — 1889-06-29 (Blandford, Dorset, England)

SECRET MEETING OF EXILES.  From George Kennan's illustrated article on the Mines of Kara, in the July Century, we quote the following—" One by one the political convicts of the free command began to assemble at Miss Armfeldt's house. Every few minutes a low signal-knock would be heard at one of the window-shutters and Miss Armfeldt would go cautiously to the door, inquire who was there, and when satisfied that it was one of her companions would take down the bar and give him admission. The small, dimly lighted cabin, the strained hush of anxiety and apprehension, the soft, mysterious knocking at the window-shutters, the low but eager conversation, and the troop of pale-faced men and women who crowded about me with intense, wondering interest as if I were a man that had just risen from the dead, made me feel like one talking and acting in a strange, vivid dream. There was not, in the whole environment, a single suggestion of the real, commonplace, outside world; and when the convicts, with bated breath, began to tell me ghastly stories of cruelty, suffering, insanity, and suicide at the mines, I felt almost as if I had entered • the gloomy gate over which Dante saw inscribed the dread warning, ' Leave hoe behind.' "About 9 o'clock, just as I had taken out my note book and began to write, a loud, imperative knock was heard at the side window-shutter. Madam Kolenkina exclaimed in a low, hoarse whisper, 'lt's the gendarmes! Don't let them come in. Tell them who of us are here, and perhaps they'll be satisfied.' Everybody was silent, and it seemed to me that I could hear my heart beat while Miss Arrnfeldt went to the door and with cool self-possession said to the gendarmes, 'We are all here: my mother, I, Kurteyef, Madam Kolenkina, and'—the other names I could not catch. After a moment's parley the gendarmes seemed to go away, Mist Armfefdt shut and re-barred the door, and coming back into the room said with a smile, 'They were satisfied; they didn't insist on coming in.' Then, turning to me, she added in English 'The gendarmes visit us three times a day to see what we are doing, and to make sure that we have not escaped. Their visits, however, have become formal, and they do not always come in.' Conversation was then resumed, and for two hours or more I listened to stories of convict life in prison, on the road, or at the mines, and answered as well as I could the eager questions of the convicts with regard to the progress of the Russian revolutionary movement. In the course of the talk my attention was accidentally attracted to a person whom I had not particularly noticed before and to whom I had not been introduced. It was a man thirty or thirty-five years of age, with a colorless, strangely vacant face and large, protruding blue eyes. He had seated himself on a low wooden stool directly in front of me, had rested his elbows on his knels with his chin in his open hands, and was staring up at me with a steady and at the same time expressionless gaze in which there seemed to be something unnatural and uncanny. At the first pause in the conversation he said to me abruptly, but in a strange, drawling, monotonous tone, 'We—have—  a—graveyard—of like—to—gee--it?  - Would you  "I was so surprised and startled by his manner and by the nature of his question that I did not for a moment reply; but the conviction soddenly flashed upon me that it was a political convict who had lost his reason. As the knocking at the gate after the murder in Macbeth seemed to De Quincey to deepen the emotions excited by the tragedy and to reflect back a sert of added horror upon all that had preceded it, so this strange, unprompted question, with its suggestions of insanity and death, seemed to render more vivid and terrible the stories of human suffering that I had just heard, and to intensify all the emotions roused in my mind by the great tragedy of penal servitude."