the unpaved and unsewered streets of the city to lakes of liquid mud, and making it practically impossible to go out of doors. We succeeded, with the aid of a droshky, in getting to the post-office and back, and devoted the remainder of the day to reading, and to writing letters. On Saturday, during lulls in the storm, we walked and rode about the city, but saw little to reward us for our trouble. The muddy, unpaved streets did not differ much in appearance from the streets of the villages through which we had passed, except
that some of them had plank sidewalks, and the unpainted log houses with high, steep, pyramidal roofs were larger and more pretentious. There was the same absence of trees, shrubbery, front yards and front doors which we had noticed in all of the Siberian villages; and but for the white-walled and green-domed churches, which gave it a certain air of picturesqueness, the town would have been commonplace and uninteresting.
The only letter of introduction we had to deliver in Tiumén was from a Russian gentleman in St. Petersburg to Mr. Slovtsóf, director of the reálnoi uchílishche, an institution that is known in Germany as a "real schule." Saturday afternoon, the storm having broken, we presented this letter and were received by Mr. Slovtsóf with great cordiality. The educational institution over which he presides is a scientific and technical school similar in plan to the Institute of Technology in Boston. It occupies the largest and finest edifice in the city—a substantial two-story structure of white-stuccoed brick, nearly twice as large as the Executive Mansion in Washington. This building was
