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ever, and there was the same exquisite symmetry and harmony of features that had made her a vision of loveliness to so many men. But Tom seemed more interested in his cousin, whom he kept laughing with a little childish byplay while talking to his sister's guest. Rachel felt herself baffled, and by degrees, though treated cordially, she began to feel humiliated. When dinner was finished by a course of pumpkin pie and quince preserves, served with cream, Tom pushed back his chair and explained that he was just going to begin building some rail pens to hold the corn when it should be gathered and shucked, and that he could not allow himself the usual noon-time rest. The days were getting so short, you know. Would Rachel excuse him? Barbara would blow the horn so that he could put the saddle on Rachel's horse when she wanted it. But would n't she stay to supper?

Rachel declined to stay to supper, and she was visibly less animated after dinner than she had been before. The conversation flagged on both sides; Barbara became preoccupied with her winding-blades, her bobbins, and her shuttle, while Rachel was absorbed in turning the heel of her stocking. By half-past 1 o'clock the guest felt bound to go home; the days were getting shorter and there was much to be done at home, she remembered. The horn was blown, and Tom led her horse out to the block and helped her to mount. As he held her stirrup for her to place her foot, it brought to his memory, with a rush, her refusal to let him ride home with her from the Timber Creek school-house after the "singing." When he looked up he saw that Rachel's mind had followed the same line of association; both of them colored at this manifest encounter of their thoughts.

"I suppose I ought n't to have said 'no' that day at the school-house." Rachel spoke with feeling, moved more by the desperate desire she felt to draw Tom out than by any calculation in making the remark.

"Yes, you ought," said Tom. "I never blamed you."

Then there was an awkward pause. "Good-bye, Tom," said Rachel, extending her hand. "Won't you come over and see us sometime?"

"I'm generally too tired when night comes. Good-bye, Rachel"; and he took her hand in a friendly way. But this was one of those adieux that are aggravated by mental contrast, and Rachel felt, as she looked at Tom's serious and preoccupied face, that it was to her the end of a chapter.

Tom started up the pathway toward the

house, but stopped half-way and plucked a ripe seed-pod from the top of a poppy-stalk, and rubbed it out between his two hands as he looked a little regretfully after Rachel until she disappeared over the hill. Then he turned and saw Barbara standing on the porch regarding him inquiringly.

"You are n't like yourself any more, Tom," she said.

"I know that," he answered, meditatively, at the same time filliping the minute poppy-seeds away, half a dozen at a time, with his thumb. "I don't seem to be the same fellow that I was three months ago. Then I'd 'a' followed Rachel like a dog every step of the way home." "She's awfully in love with you, poor girl." "Oh! she 'll get over that, I suppose. She's been in love before."

"And you don't care for her any more?" "I don't seem to care for anything that I used to care for. I would n't like to be what I used to be."

This sentence was rather obscure, and Barbara still looked at Tom inquiringly and waited for him to explain. But he only went on in the same inconsequential way, as he plucked and rubbed out another poppy-head. "I don't care for anything nowadays, but just to stay with you and mother. When a fellow's been through what I have, I suppose he is n't ever the same that he was; it takes the ambition out of you. Hanging makes an awful change in your feelings, you know"; and he smiled grimly.

"Don't say that; you make me shiver," said Barbara.

"But I say, Barb," and with this Tom sowed broadcast in the dooryard all the poppyseed in his hand, "yonder comes somebody over the hill that 'll get a warmer welcome than Rachel did, I 'll guarantee.”

How often in the last week had Barbara looked to see if somebody were not coming over the hill! Now she found her vision obstructed by a "laylock" bush, and she came down the path to where her brother stood. As soon as she had made out that the pedestrian was certainly Hiram Mason, she turned and went into the house, to change her apron for a fresher one, and with an instinctive wish to hide from Mason a part of the eagerness she had felt for his coming. But when he had reached the gate and was having his hand cordially shaken by Tom, Barbara came back to the door to greet him; and just because she could n't help it, she went out on the porch, then down the steps and half-way to the gate to tell him how glad she was to see him.

(To be continued.)

Edward Eggleston.

THE STEPPES OF THE IRTISH.

DECIDED, after careful consideration, to proceed from Tiumen to Tomsk through the steppes of the Irtish by way of Omsk, Pavlodar, Semipalatinsk, Ust-Kamenogorsk, and Barnaul. This route would take us through the best agricultural part of the provinces of Tobolsk and Tomsk, as well as the districts most thickly settled by exiles; it would enable us to see something of the Mohammedan city of Semipalatinsk and of the great nomadic and pastoral tribe of natives known as the Kirghis; and finally it would afford us an opportunity to explore a part of the Russian Altai-a high, picturesque, mountainous region on the Mongolian frontier, which had been described to me by Russian army officers, in terms of enthusiastic admiration, as "the Siberian Switzerland." I had, moreover, another reason for wishing to keep as far away as possible from the regular through routes of travel. I supposed when we left St. Petersburg that we should be obliged to go from Tiumen to Tomsk either by steamer or over the great Siberian road. The Minister of the Interior understood that such would be our course, and he caused letters to be written to all the local officials along these routes, apprising them of our coming and furnishing them with such instructions concerning us as the circumstances seemed to require. What these instructions were I could never ascertain; but they anticipated us at every important point on the great Siberian road from Tiumen to the capital of the TransBaikal. In eastern Siberia the local authorities knew all about us months before we arrived. I first became aware of these letters and this system of official surveillance at Tiumen; and as they seemed likely to interfere seriously with my plans,- particularly in the field of political exile,- I determined to escape or elude them as far as possible, by leaving the regular through route and going into a region where the authorities had not presumably been forewarned of our coming. I had reason afterward to congratulate myself upon the exercise of sound judgment in making this decision. The détour to the southward brought us not only into the part of Siberia where the political exiles enjoy most freedom, and where it is easiest to make their acquaintance, but into a province which was then governed by a liberal and humane

man.

On the morning of Tuesday, June 30, having made our farewell calls, purchased a tarantas, and provided ourselves with a "padorozhnaya," or order for horses, we left Tiumen for Semipalatinsk by the regular Government post. The Imperial Russian Post is now perhaps the most extensive and perfectly organized horse-express service in the world. From the southern end of the peninsula of Kamtchatka to the most remote village in Finland, from the frozen, wind-swept shores of the Arctic Ocean to the hot, sandy deserts of central Asia, the whole empire is one vast net-work of post routes. You may pack your portmanteau in Nizhni Novgorod, get a padorozhnaya from the postal department, and start for Petropavlovsk, Kamtchatka, seven thousand miles away, with the full assurance that throughout the whole of that enormous distance there will be horses, reindeer, or dogs ready and waiting to carry you on, night and day, to your destination. It must, however, be borne in mind that the Russian post route is a very different thing from the old English post route, and that the Russian horse express differs widely, not only from our own western "pony express," but from the horse expresses of most other countries. The characteristic feature of the west European and American systems is the stagecoach or diligence, which leaves certain places at certain stated hours, or, in other words, runs upon a prearranged time schedule. It is precisely this feature which the Russian system does not have. There are, generally speaking, no stage-coach lines in Russia; the vehicles which carry the mails do not carry passengers, and, away from the railroads, there is no such thing as traveling upon a fixed time schedule. You are never obliged, therefore, to wait for a public conveyance which leaves at a certain stated hour, and then go through to your destination in that conveyance, stopping when it stops and starting when it starts, without regard to your own health, comfort, or convenience. On the contrary, you may ride in your own sleigh or carriage, and have it drawn by post horses. You may travel at the rate of 175 miles in 24 hours, or 24 miles in 175 hours, just as you feel inclined. You may stop when you like, where you like, and for as long a time as you like, and when you are ready to move on, you have only to order out your horses and get into your vehicle. It makes no difference in what part of the empire you may happen to be, nor

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ered with a scattered growth of willow and alder bushes, small birchtrees, and scrubby firs and pines, which in every direction limited the vision and hid the horizon line. All this part of the province of Tobolsk seems to have been, within a comparatively recent geological period, the bottom of a great inland sea which united the Caspian and the sea of Aral with the Arctic Ocean, along the line of the shallow depression through which now flow the rivers Irtish and Ob. Everywhere between Tiumen and Omsk we saw evidences, in the shape of sand-banks, salt-marshes, beds of clay, and swampy lakes, to show that we were traveling over a partly dried up sea bottom.

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SKETCH MAP OF SIBERIA, SHADED PORTION SHOWING ROUTE DESCRIBED IN THIS ARTICLE.

to what part you may wish to go. Send your padorozhnaya to the nearest post station, and in twenty minutes you will be riding away at the rate of ten miles an hour, with your postal order in your pocket and a hundred relays of fresh horses distributed at intervals along your

route.

The established rate of payment for transportation over the post routes of western Siberia seems to an American absurdly low. It amounts, including the compensation of the driver, to 1% cents per mile for every horse, or 33% cents per mile for the usual “ troika," or team of three. In other words, two persons can travel in their own carriage with a team of 3 horses a distance of 20 miles for 68 cents, or 34 cents each. I used to feel almost ashamed sometimes to wake up a driver at a post station, in the middle of a stormy night, compel him to harness three horses and drive us 20 miles over a dark, miry, and perhaps dangerous road, and then offer him for this service the pitiful sum of 68 cents. Trifling and inadequate, however, as such compensation may seem, it is large enough to tempt into this field of enterprise hundreds of peasant farmers who compete with the Government post by furnishing what are known as "volni" or "free" horses, for the transportation of travelers from one village to another. As these free horses are generally better fed and in better condition than the over-driven animals at the post stations, it is often advantageous to employ them; and your driver, as you approach a village, will almost always turn around and inquire whether he shall take you to the Government post station or to the house of a "friend." Traveling with "drushki," or "friends," costs no more than traveling by post, and it enables one to see much more of the domestic life of the Siberian peasants than one could see by stopping and changing horses only at regular post stations.

The first part of our journey from Tiumen to Omsk was comparatively uneventful and uninteresting. The road ran across a great marshy plain, full of swampy lakes, and cov

Tiumen

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Tobolsk

River Irt

About a hundred versts from Tiumen, just beyond the village of Zavodo-ukofskaya, we stopped for two hours early in the evening at the residence and estate of a wealthy Siberian manufacturer named Kolmakoff, to whom I had a letter of introduction from a Russian friend. I was surprised to find in this remote part of the world so many evidences of comfort, taste, and luxury as were to be seen in and about Mr. Kolmakoff's house. The house itself was only a two-story building of logs, but it was large and comfortably furnished, and its windows looked out over an artificial lake, and a beautiful garden, with winding walks, rustic arbors, long lines of currant and raspberry bushes, and beds of flowering plants. At one end of this garden was a spacious conservatory, filled with geraniums, verbenas, hydrangeas, cacti, orange and lemon trees, pine-apples, and all sorts oftropical and semi-tropical shrubs, and near at hand was a large hothouse, full of cucumbers and ripening cantaloupes. In the middle of the garden

Ishim

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stood a square building, sixty feet long by forty or fifty feet wide, which was composed almost entirely of glass, which had no floor except the earth, and which served, Mr. Kolmakoff said, as a sort of winter garden and a place of recreation during cold or stormy weather. In this miniature Crystal Palace stood a perfect grove of bananas and young palms, through which ran winding walks bordered by beds of flowers, with here and there amidst the greenery a comfortable lounging place or rustic seat. The trees, flowers, and shrubs were not planted in tubs or pots, but grew directly out of the earthen floor of the greenhouse, so that the effect was almost precisely that of a semi-tropical garden inclosed in glass.

"Who would have thought," said Mr. Frost, as he threw himself into one of the rustic seats beside a bed of blossoming verbenas, "that we should come to Siberia to sit under palmtrees and in the shade of bananas!"

After a walk through the spacious wooded park which adjoined the garden, we returned to the house, and were served with a lunch or cold supper consisting of caviar, pickled mushrooms, salmon, cold boiled fowl, white bread, sweet cakes, and wild strawberries, with vodka, two or three kinds of wine, and tea.

It had grown quite dark when, about 11 o'clock, the horses which we had ordered in the neighboring village arrived, and bidding our courteous host good-bye, we climbed into the tarantas and set out for a long, dark, and dreary night's ride. The road, which had never been good, was in worse condition than usual, owing to recent and heavy rains. Our driver urged four powerful horses over it at breakneck speed, and we were so jounced, jolted, and shaken that it was utterly impossible to get any sleep, and difficult enough merely to keep our seats in the vehicle. Early in the morning, sleepy, jaded, and exhausted, we reached the village of Novo Zaimskaya, entered the little log-house of our driver's "friend," threw our selves on the bare floor, where half a dozen members of the friend's family were already lying, and for two or three hours lost consciousness of our aching spinal columns in the heavy dreamless slumber of physical exhaustion.

Throughout the next day and the following night we traveled, without rest, and of course without sleep, over a terribly bad steppe road, and at 6 o'clock Thursday morning arrived in a pelting rain-storm at the circuit town of Ishim. No one who has not experienced it can fully realize the actual physical suffering which is involved in posting night and day at high speed over bad Siberian roads. We made the 200 miles between Tiumen and

Ishim in about 35 hours of actual travel, with only 4 hours of sleep, and were so jolted and shaken that every bone in our bodies ached, and it was with difficulty that we could climb into and out of our mud-bespattered tarantas at the post stations.

It had been our intention to make a short stop at Ishim, but the bad weather discouraged us, and after drinking tea at a peasant's house on the bank of the Ishim river, we resumed our journey. As we rode out of the town through a thin forest of birch-trees, we began to notice large numbers of men, women, and children plodding along on foot through the mud in the same direction that we were going. Most of them were common "muzhiks," with trousers inside their boots and shirt-flaps outside their trousers, or sun-burned peasant women in red and blue gowns, with white kerchiefs over their heads; but there were also a few pedestrians in the conventional dress of the civilized world, who manifestly belonged to the higher classes, and who even carried umbrellas.

About four miles from the town we saw ahead a great crowd of men and women marching towards us in a dense, tumultuous throng, carrying big three-armed crosses, white and colored banners, and huge glass lanterns mounted on long black staves. As they came nearer I could see that the throng was densest in the middle of the muddy road, under what seemed to be a large gilt-framed picture which was borne high in air at the end of a long, stout wooden pole. The lower end of this pole rested in a socket in the middle of a square framework which had handles on all four sides, and which was carried by six bare-headed peasants. The massive frame of the portrait was made either of gold or of silver gilt, since it was manifestly very heavy, and half a dozen men steadied, by means of guy ropes, the standard which supported it, as the bearers, with their faces bathed in perspiration, staggered along under their burden. In front of the picture marched a bare-headed, long-haired priest with a book in his hands, and on each side were four or five blackrobed deacons and acolytes, carrying embroidered silken banners, large three-armed gilt crosses, and peculiar church lanterns, which looked like portable street gas-posts with candles burning in them. The priest, the deacons, and all the bare-headed men around the picture were singing in unison a deep, hoarse, monotonous chant as they splashed along through the mud, and the hundreds of men and women who surged around the standard that supported the portrait were constantly crossing themselves, and joining at intervals in the chanted psalm or prayer. Scores of

peasant women had taken off their shoes and stockings and slung them over their shoulders, and were wading with bare feet and legs through the black, semi-liquid mire, and neither men nor women seemed to pay the slightest attention to the rain, which beat upon their unprotected heads and trickled in little rivulets down their hard, sun-burned faces. The crowd numbered, I should think, four or five hundred persons, more than half of whom were women, and as it approached the town it was constantly receiving accessions from the groups of pedestrians that we had overtaken and passed.

Since entering Siberia I had not seen such a strange and medieval picture as that presented by the black-robed priest and acolytes, the embroidered banners, the lighted lanterns, the gilded crosses, and the great throng of bareheaded and bare-legged peasants, tramping along the black, muddy road through the forest in the driving rain, singing a solemn ecclesiastical chant. I could almost imagine that we had been carried back to the eleventh century and were witnessing the passage of a detachment of Christian villagers who had been stirred up and excited by the eloquence of Peter the Hermit, and were marching with crosses, banners, and chanting to join the great host of the crusaders.

When the last stragglers in the rear of the procession had passed, and the hoarse, monotonous chant had died away in the distance, I turned to Mr. Frost and said, "What do you suppose is the meaning of all that?"

"I have n't the least idea," he replied. "It is evidently a church procession, but what it has been doing out here in the woods, I can't imagine."

By dint of persistent questioning I finally succeeded in eliciting from our driver an intelligible explanation of the phenomenon. There was, it appeared, in one of the churches of Ishim, a very old ikon, or portrait of "the Mother of God," which was reputed to have supernatural powers and to answer the prayers of faithful believers. In order that the country people who were unable to come to Ishim might have an opportunity to pray to this miracle-working image, and to share in the blessings supposed to be conferred by its mere presence, it was carried once a year, or once in two years, through all the principal villages of the Ishim okrug, or district. Special services in its honor were held in the village churches, and hundreds of peasants accompanied it as it was borne with solemn pomp and ceremony from place to place. It had been on such a tour when we saw it and was on its way back to the church in Ishim where it belonged, and our driver had stated the fact in the simplest

and most direct way when he said that "the Mother of God was coming home."

Rain fell at intervals throughout the day Thursday, but we pushed on over a muddy steppe road in the direction of Tiukalinsk, changing horses at the post stations of Borofskaya, Tushnolobova, Abatskaya, and Kamyshenka, and stopping for the night at a peasant's house in the village of Orlova. In the 60 hours which had elapsed since our departure from Tiumen we had traveled 280 miles, with only 4 hours of sleep, and we were so much exhausted that we could not go any farther without rest. The weather during the night finally cleared up, and when we resumed our journey on the following morning the sun was shining brightly in an almost unclouded sky, and the air was fresh, invigorating, and filled with fragrant odors.

Although the road continued bad, the country as we proceeded southward and eastward steadily improved in appearance, and before noon we were riding across a beautiful fertile and partly cultivated prairie, which extended in every direction as far as the eye could reach, with nothing to break the horizon line except an occasional clump of small birch-trees or a dark-green thicket of willow and alder bushes. The steppe was bright with flowers, and here and there appeared extensive tracts of black, newly plodded land, or vast fields of waving grain, which showed that the country was inhabited; but there was not a fence, nor a barn, nor a house to be seen in any direction, and I could not help wondering where the village was to which these cultivated fields belonged. My curiosity was soon to be satisfied. In a few moments our driver gathered up his muddy rope reins, braced himself securely in his seat, threw out behind and above his head the long heavy lash of his short-handled knout, and bringing it down with stinging force across the backs of his four horses shouted, in a high falsetto and a deep bass, " Heekh-ya-a-a!" The whole team instantly broke into a frantic, tearing gallop, which made me involuntarily hold my breath, until it was suddenly jounced out of me by a terrific jolt as the tarantas, going at the rate of fifteen miles an hour, dropped into a deep rut and rebounded with tremendous force, throwing me violently out of my seat, and making my head and back throb with the shock of the unexpected concussion. I needed no further evidence that we were approaching a village. A Siberian team never fully shows what it can do until it is within half a mile of its destination, and then it suddenly becomes a living tornado of energy. I shouted to the driver," Pastoi! Teeshei!" ["Hold on! Don't go so fast!"] but it was of no use. Both driver and horses knew that this was the final

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