3 o BY ORDER OF THE CZAR.
conversation in the only language they knew. They re- lieved the way with much drinking of tea and smoking of strong tobacco, and Dick continually bent his eyes for- ward and used his field-glasses frequently in the hope of catching a glimpse of the miserable travelers ahead. On the second day. and towards evening, after leaving Eka- terinburg, the driver, with a cry of " Vot granista ! " pulled up his horses.
The weather had turned bitterly cold, and the snow was falling.
Dick, muffled up in his fur cloak, had fallea asleep for the first time during many hours, in the furthermost cor- ner of the great boat-shaped, four-wheeled carriage, which for some time had been carefully hooded and covered by way of protection from the weather.
Starting up, he found his fellow-passengers alighting and repeating the two words of the driver, " Vot granista." (Plere's the boundary.)
They were in a forest clearing.
Before them, by the roadside, stood a tall pillar, and round about it a strange weird group of men and women, soldiers on foot and mounted Cossacks, their spears bright amidst light feathery flakes of falling snow, which was transforming the surrounding country into a white world.
They had arrived at the boundary post of Siberia, a square pillar, ten or twelve feet in height, of stuccoed or plastered brick, bearing on one side the coat of arms of the European province of Perm, and on the other the Asiatic province of Tobolsk. " No other spot between St. Petersburg and the Pacific," says Mr. George Kennan, whose current work I have already mentioned, " is more full of painful suggestions, and none has for the traveler a more melancholy interest than the little opening in the forest where stands this grief-consecrated pillar. Here hundreds of thousands of exiled human beings men,
