put annually upon the market goods to the value of 8,517,000 rúbles. Besides the workmen employed in the regular manufacturing establishments, the urban population includes 27,000 mechanics and skilled laborers. Cottage industries are carried on extensively throughout the province, and produce annually, among other things, 50,000 rugs and carpets; 1,500,000 fathoms of fish netting; 2,140,000 yards of linen cloth; 50,000 barrels; 70,000 telégas and sleighs; leather manufactures to the value of 2,500,000 rúbles; and quantities of dressed furs, stockings, mittens, belts, scarfs, laces, and ornamented towels and sheets. The quantity of fish caught annually along the Ob and its tributaries is estimated at 8000 tons, and salt to the amount of 3000 tons is used in curing it. Tiumén, which is the most important town in the province, stands on a navigable branch of the vast Ob river system, through which it has steam communication with the greater part of Western Siberia, from Semipalátinsk and Tomsk to the shores of the arctic ocean. Fifty-eight steamers ply on the Ob and its tributaries, most of them between Tomsk and Tiumén, and through the latter city is transported annually merchandise to the value of thirty or forty million rúbles. Sixteen million rúbles' worth of Siberian products are brought every year to the Nízhni Nóvgorod fair, and in exchange for this mass of raw material European Russia sends annually to Siberia nearly 300,000 tons of manufactured goods.
It cannot, I think, be contended that a country which furnishes such statistics as these is an arctic desert or an uninhabited waste.
On the next day after our arrival in Tiumén the weather furnished us with convincing evidence of the fact that the Siberian summer climate, although sometimes as mild and delightful as that of California, is fickle and untrustworthy. During the night the wind changed suddenly to the northeast, and a furious storm of cold, driving rain swept down across the tundras from the coast of the arctic ocean, turning
