city, undertook to enlighten the crowd upon the subject of the Americans, who, he said, "were the wisest people that God had ever created, and the only people that had ever sailed into the great Icy Sea." One of the old inhabitants contended that Russian navigators had also penetrated the Icy Sea, and that although they might not be so "wise" as the Americans, they were quite as good sailors in icy waters. This gave rise to an animated discussion of polar exploration, in the midst of which the young fellow who had been sent after the horses came back with whistle and whoop, driving the animals before him into the court-yard, where they were soon harnessed, and were then brought out and fastened with long rope traces to the tárantás. Our new driver mounted the box, inquired whether we were ready, and gathering up his rope reins shouted "Noo-oo!" to his horses; and with a measured jangle of bells from the arch over the thill-horse's back, and a "splash-spatter-splash" of hoofs in the mud, we rolled out of the settlement.
Such, with trifling variations in detail, was the regular routine of arrival and departure in all of the steppe villages where we changed horses between Tiumén and Omsk. The greater number of these villages were dreary, forlorn-looking places, containing neither yards, walks, trees, grass-plots, nor shrubbery, and presenting to the eye nothing but two parallel lines of gray, dilapidated log-houses and tumble-down court-yard walls rising directly out of the long pool of jet-black mud that formed the solitary street.
It is with a feeling of intense pleasure and relief that one leaves such a village and rides out upon the wide, clean, breezy steppe where the air is filled with the fragrance of clover and the singing of birds, and where the eye is constantly delighted with great sweeps of smooth, velvety turf, or vast undulating expanses of high steppe grass sprinkled in the foreground with millions of wild roses, white marguerites, delicate five-angled harebells, and dark-red tiger-lilies. Between the village of Krutáya and Kalmakóva, on
