covered with an irregular patchwork of cultivated fields. The weather was cool and fall-like, but the mosquitos were still troublesome, and the flowers continued to be abundant. On the 6th of September I counted thirty-four different kinds of flowers in blossom beside the road, including wild roses, forget-me-nots, crane's-bill, two or three species of aster, goldenrod, wild mustard, monk's-hood, spirea, buttercups, fireweed, bluebells, vase pinks, and Kírghis caps. Many of them were blooming out of their proper season and were represented by only a few scattered specimens; but of others we might have picked millions. The most attractive and highly cultivated region that we saw was that lying between the post-stations of Itátskaya and Bogotólskaya, about fifty miles west of Áchinsk. The weather was warm and pleasant, and the picture presented by the fertile rolling country with its rich autumnal coloring, the clumps of silver birch and poplar here and there in the flowery meadows, the extensive fields of ripe yellow wheat which stretched away up the gentle sunny slopes of the hills, and the groups of men and women in scarlet or blue shirts who were harvesting the grain with clumsy sickles, or eating their noonday lunch in the shade of a frost-tinted birch by the roadside, was not unworthy of an artist's pencil, nor of comparison with any rural landscape of like character in the world.
The villages, however, in this part of Siberia were less deserving of commendation than was the scenery. They consisted generally of a double line of gray, unpainted log houses extending sometimes for two or three versts along the miry, chocolate-colored road, without the least sign anywhere of foliage or vegetation, except, perhaps, the leafy branch of a tree nailed up at the door of one of the numerous kabáks, "Rhine cellars," "drinking establishments," pitéini doms or optóvi sklads, which in every Siberian village bring revenue to the Government and demoralization to the peasants. These bush-decorated houses are of many
