BY ORDER OF THE CZAR. Chapter IV.

Otago Witness, Issue 1891, 1 May 1890, Page 29

BY ORDER OF THE CZAR.

Chapter IV.

By JOSEPH H ATT ON,

THE TRAGIC STORY OF ANNA KLOSSTOCK, • The queen of the GHETTO.

Author of " Cruel London," "The Three Recruits," " John Needham'a Double," &c.

Consult your Encyclopedia and you will ' find that the majority of the inhabitants of the central provinces of Siberia are Russians and Poles who have been sent thithereither as political or Criminal exiles j leavened some- j what by a respectable minority of colonists. The worst type of criminals and the prisoners who have given most offence to the reigning powers in the fierce political conspiracies, are condemned to hard labotir in the mines; others are detailed for work of a less fatal character; and there is a third degree of punishment which gives to tha political exile a large amount of freedom, in which many live more or less contentedly, with wives and families, and occasionally even preferring such limited freedom to a return to their for- j mer homes. They are relegated to specific ! districts under the surveillance of the police, but are permitted to employ themselves how they please. Some of these have entered upon their new life with their household goods accompanied from Moscow by their wives. Many pathetic stories that are honourable to our humanity are told of lovely women thus sacrificing themselves on the altar of their loVes, even marrying for the sake of such feminine martyrdom. The general impression of the reader who has dwelt upon the gentle romance of Madame Cottin's "Elizabeth," is that around the heroine's humble home in the province of Ishim, the world was dark and dreary, and had but one sad tale of snow and chilly landscape, forgetting the author's description of the four months of summer that reigned even there with the perfumed blossoms of the birch tree, which the exiles cultivated in their little gafden ; the playful flocks of wild fowl on the lake ; the genial character of the air ; the pleasant sunshine. It is true these delights were only enjoyed to the full by the natives of the country, the exiles still sighing for their liberty and the sight of old friends. Elizabeth, in the well-known story, at last found a merciful Czar, and this present history is not all one long record of Imperial tyranny, though the mercy found for the exile of Tobolsk, and the interposition of the direct Imperial power which marked the closing days of Anna Klosstock and her father, not to mention the release of Philip Forsyth, are romantic exceptions to the general outcome of those official " orders of the Czar," which fill the bleakest spots of the Siberian world with weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. \ There are instances of exiles, as I have said, preferring to remain in the favoured category of relaxed Siberian discipline, wretched men and women who have outlived their friends, and who no longer feel that they possess the capacity to begin the new life that is offered to them. Possibly these cases are few and far between, but thousands of exiles, after their term of detention has ceased, continue in the country, becoming farmers, traders, trappers, and following the occupations from which they had been carried off by the strong and too often secret arm of the law. Johannes Klosstock had for some years been permitted the highest privileges allowed to the exile ; and he had accepted the relief with the same religious resignation that had entered his soul from the first. He had long since ceased to suffer. The past had become to him a dream. Happy Czarovna was still his world. He walked out in summer days and saw Anna and his wife. He sat by the stove 'in winter and talked with Losinski and the famous Italian traveller Ferrari. Once in a way there would come to him disturbing glimmerings of the bitter change that had left him all alone with only his dream. But he was a religious man; he bowed his head and prayed, and looked forward to the coming of the Messiah, and to the reality of a reunion of wife and child. One summer afternoon, sitting at the door of his simple hut, where he was permitted to have the attendance of an old Polish housekeeper, who was devoted to the old man, he saw the apparition of his daughter Anna. She cameout of the distant woodland, crossed the rough bridge which spanned the stream, a tributary of the great lake ; then pausing, she turned towards the cottage. The old man smiled. The summer sunshine fell upon the much-loved figure in what he conceived to be his happy dream. "My dear, dear Anna," he said ; and the woman came on, flowers in her path, peace in her heart. She was no imaginary Anna walking in the silent land of the father's tender fancy ; she paused at the primitive gate that finished the rough fencing of the tiny garden, and saw her