I made my first acquaintance with the pine forests. After it had gone I roamed one morning into the forest with a Siberian peasant as a companion. The rivers, filled with snow-water, had risen to the height of spring flood, covering the low marshes and swamping the grassy meadows. After a little while we came across an open grassy glade, where we found a little hut. Here an old Siberian peasant kept his bees, coming occasionally to visit his hives, which were cut out of hollow pine logs and picturesquely thatched with dry grass. What a romantic spot! In the pine forest, where the snow had just melted, the grass was beginning to shoot up, growing with those spearlike apexes which betoken rapid growth; and the music of many wings indicated the activity of the bees, collecting honey from the thousands of spring flowers that were bursting forth. The growth of the vegetation is indescribable. No sooner had the snow gone than millions of grasses, forget-me-nots, orange trollius, anemones, peonies and wild onions had shot up, and were forming an emerald carpet inwrought with the choicest colours of the forest. I had visited this glade in the pine forest a week before, when the snow was lying, and now I found myself wading two feet deep in herbage such as I have just described. All round me I heard the echoes of spring. I heard the call of the cuckoo ringing in the forest, the cry of the great black woodpecker, the chatter of the finches and the crossbills in the pine-trees overhead. A brilliant sun, a gentle breeze, and the fragrance of growing grass combined to perfect the picture. Beyond the pine forest there was a zone of aspen poplar, in the cool shade of which I often wandered. Nature here was not bursting
