necessary requisition for horses, but said he must warn me that an epidemic of smallpox prevailed in all the region between Strétinsk and the mines, and that it would be unsafe for us to sleep at night in the peasants' houses, or even to go into them for food. This unwelcome intelligence discouraged us more than anything that we had yet heard. The journey to the mines would involve hardship enough at best, and if, in a temperature that was almost constantly below zero, we could not enter a peasant's house to obtain food or shelter without risk of taking the smallpox, we should be between the horns of a very unpleasant dilemma. I was strongly tempted to proceed westward to the town of Nérchinsk, and enter the mining district from that side; but such a course would greatly increase the distance to be traveled, and finding that Mr. Frost was willing to share with me the risk of infection, I finally decided to adhere to our original plan. Sunday afternoon we loaded our baggage into a small, shallow teléga, lashed on behind a bag of frozen bread upon which we could not comfortably sit, and set out, with two horses and a ragged, low-spirited driver, for the Alexandrófski Zavód and the mine of Algachí.
The silver mines of Nérchinsk are not situated, as one might suppose them to be, at or near the town of Nérchinsk, but are scattered over a wild, desolate, mountainous region, thousands of square miles in extent, known as "The Nérchinsk Silver-mining District." This district is coterminous, on its southern side, with the frontier line of Mongolia, and occupies the greater part of the irregular triangle formed by the rivers Shílka and Argún, just above the point where they unite to form the Amúr. The existence of silver and lead ore in this region was known even to the prehistoric aborigines of Siberia, and traces of their primitive mining operations were found near the Argún by the first Russian explorers of the country. In the year 1700 Greek mining engineers in the employ of the Russian Government founded the Nérchinski Zavód, or Nérchinsk Works, near the Mongolian frontier, and before the end of the century shafts
