The Cotton Factory Times. — 1888-06-15 (Manchester, Greater Manchester, England)

RUSSIAN FORTRESS PRISON.  When a political prisoner is brought at night to one of these casemates (in Petropavlovsk St. Petersburg) he is first of all stripped naked. A careful examination is made of his person to ascertain whether he ha e anything concealed in his hair, month, ears, or nostrils, and when the guard are satisfied that he has not, they have to give him in place of his own clothing a prison costume consisting of a coarse linen shirt, drawers of the same material, a long blue linen dressing gown, woollen stockings, and a pair of soft felt slippers. As soon as he has put on these garments the soldiers of the guard retire, the heavy wooden door closes behind them, the key grinds in the rusty padlock, and the prisoner is left alone in the dimly lighted casemate. The stillness is that of the grave. There is not a footstep, nor a voice, nor a sound of any kind to indicate the presence of another human being in the bastion. Every fifteen minutes the bells of the fortress cathedral chime out slowly the air with which the words, "Have mercy, 0 Lord!" are associated in the Russian liturgy, and every hour they ring the melody of the ecclesiastical chant, "How glorious is our Lord in Zion I" The damp, heavy atmosphere, the dripping walls, the oppressive silence, and the faint muffled tones of the cathedral bells chiming mournful airs from the church liturgy, all seem to say to the lonely and dejected prisoner, "Although not dead you are buried." Crushed by the thought that this is the end of all his hopes and aspirations and struggles for the welfare of his country, tortured by anxiety concerning the fate of those nearest and dearest to him, he rises from the narrow iron bed upon which he has thrown himself in the first paroxysm of despair, and begins to pace his cell. "How long," he asks himself, "will this continue ?" He reviews mentally the events which preceded and followed his arrest, recalls the questions that were asked him at the preliminary examination, and tries to form from the facts of his case a calm judgment as to the probable duration of his imprisonment. The offence with which he is charged is not, he thinks, a serious one; there are no complicating circumstances to retard the investigation ; perhaps he will be tried and released in a few weeks. But as this ray of hope enters his heart he stoops to replace the loose felt slipper which has fallen from one foot, and in doing so notices for the first time what seems to be a faint path leading from one corner of the cell to another on the same diagonal which he has been pacing. Startled by a vague apprehension, he seizes the small lamp and examines it more closely. It is unquestionably a path—a shallow but perceptible groove worn into the solid concrete by human footsteps. The mournful significance of this discovery comes to him almost with the shock of a new misfortune. /le then is not the first prisoner who has been bnilled in this lonely casemate, nor the first who has sought in physical exercise re'ief from mental strain. Somebody who perhaps was also accused of a political offence—somebody who perhaps was also hopeful of a speedy trial—made that significant groove. Somebody heart-sick with hope long deferred, trod that path from corner to corner not merely a hundred times nor a thousand times, but hundreds of thousands of times, until the solid floor of the casemate had been worn away by his weary feet, and a long shallow depression marked the line of his monotonous march. This melancholy record of an unknown predecessor's loneliness and isolation disheartens the prisoner more than all that has happened to him since his arrest. He recalls the history of the Decenibrists, and remembers that in this same fortress, many of that gallant band of revolutionists spent all the years ot their early manhood and finally died, committed suicide, or went insane. One of them, Lieutenant-Colonel Battenkoff, languished here in solitary confinement for almost a quarter of a century; another, midshipman Diboff, was held a prisoner here until death came to his relief; a third, Lieutenant Zaikin, unable to endure the mind-destroying torture of complete isolation, killed himself by dashing his head against the wall; while a fourth, preferring even a death of agony to a life clouded by mental disorder, swallowed glass broken trom his cell window. In this same fortress still another officer lay in solitary confinement until the guards reported that he had ceased to answer questions, and an official examination showed that he had become a complete imbecile. He could still eat, drink, and perform the actions that years of unbroken routine had rendered habitual; but from his heavy, glazed eyes the last spark of human intelligence bad vanished, and he sat motionless on his bed for days at a time in the profound stupor of intellectual death..—" A Russian Political Prison," by George Kerman, in the Century Magazine.