Besides the Circassians there was a group of Poles in our room, and they made a family apart, and had hardly anything do with the other convicts. I have mentioned already that their exclusiveness and their hatred of the Russian prisoners made them hated by everyone. There were six of them; they were men broken and made morbid by suffering. Some of them were educated men; I will speak of them more fully afterwards. During my later years in prison I used sometimes to get books from them. The first book I read made a great, strange and peculiar impression upon me. I will speak of these impressions more particularly later; they were most interesting to me, and I am sure that to many people they would be utterly unintelligible. Some things one cannot judge without experience. One thing I can say, that moral privation is harder to bear than any physical agonies. When a peasant goes to prison he finds there the company of his equals, perhaps even of his superiors. He has lost a great deal, of course⁠—home, family, everything, but his environment is the same. The educated man condemned to the same punishment often loses infinitely more.