Late one evening a foreign steamer stopped in the roads of Due in Sahalin and asked for coal.  The captain was asked to wait till morning, but he did not want to wait over an hour, saying that if the weather changed for the worse in the night there would be a risk of his having to go off without coal.  In the Gulf of Tartary the weather is liable to violent changes in the course of half an hour, and then the shores of Sahalin are dangerous.  And already it had turned fresh, and there was a considerable sea running.

A gang of convicts were sent to the mine from the Voevodsky prison, the grimmest and most forbidding of all the prisons in Sahalin.  The coal had to be loaded upon barges, and then they had to be towed by a steam-cutter alongside the steamer which was anchored more than a quarter of a mile from the coast, and then the unloading and reloading had to begin—­an exhausting task when the barge kept rocking against the steamer and the men could scarcely keep on their legs for sea-sickness.  The convicts, only just roused from their sleep, still drowsy, went along the shore, stumbling in the darkness and clanking their fetters.  On the left, scarcely visible, was a tall, steep, extremely gloomy-looking cliff, while on the right there was a thick impenetrable mist, in which the sea moaned with a prolonged monotonous sound, “Ah! . . . ah! . . . ah! . . . ah! . . .”  And it was only when the overseer was lighting his pipe, casting as he did so a passing ray of light on the escort with a gun and on the coarse faces of two or three of the nearest convicts, or when he went with his lantern close to the water that the white crests of the foremost waves could be discerned.

One of this gang was Yakov Ivanitch, nicknamed among the convicts the “Brush,” on account of his long beard.  No one had addressed him by his name or his father’s name for a long time now; they called him simply Yashka.

He was here in disgrace, as, three months after coming to Siberia, feeling an intense irresistible longing for home, he had succumbed to temptation and run away; he had soon been caught, had been sentenced to penal servitude for life and given forty lashes.  Then he was punished by flogging twice again for losing his prison clothes, though on each occasion they were stolen from him.  The longing for home had begun from the very time he had been brought to Odessa, and the convict train had stopped in the night at Progonnaya; and Yakov, pressing to the window, had tried to see his own home, and could see nothing in the darkness.  He had no one with whom to talk of home.  His sister Aglaia had been sent right across Siberia, and he did not know where she was now.  Dashutka was in Sahalin, but she had been sent to live with some ex-convict in a far away settlement; there was no news of her except that once a settler who had come to the Voevodsky Prison told Yakov that Dashutka had three children.  Sergey Nikanoritch was serving as a footman at a government official’s at Due, but he could not reckon on ever seeing him, as he was ashamed of being acquainted with convicts of the peasant class.