Note 3 — UNDER NICHOLAS I.

They were called Cantonists because they were kept and trained in military settlements or cantons under Arakcheev. It is a most remarkable fact—considering the circumstance that they were taken away in early childhood—that several Cantonists who were able to live thru the horrors of the service, returned to their homes as orthodox and as fanatically devoted to their religion as if they had spent the preceding twenty-five years not in the military barracks of the gentiles, but in cheder and shool reciting the Torah.