could see thousands and thousands of men at work, pushing on with the great railway which is to connect the capital of Russia with the Pacific.

The conversation I enjoyed with the passengers on board was of an interesting and often of a surprising character. I found that your Siberian Russian regards our people, particularly our people of the Pacific slope, with very much the same consideration which we have for the unfortunate and never sufficiently to be pitied denizens of Great Britain and Europe. It will be of interest to the people of the Pacific slope to know that twenty years from now all the bread they eat and all their salmon will come from Siberia, and that if Siberia should not care to send her produce to California and to Oregon the people of those States will have to starve.

On the third morning after leaving Iman, just when the journey, despite the beauty of the river, and the ever-changing varied scenery of its banks, was beginning to pall upon me, I was awakened by the sound of a thousand hammers beating against steel plates; and when I looked out of the window I saw we had arrived at Khabarovka, and were passing the great ship yard, where steamers have been built for the purpose of navigating the

Sungaru, and other Siberian rivers which enter China in their course.

Khabarovka, this great Siberian city of the future, the St. Louis of this country, which is to become the great port of transshipment for goods going to and produce coming from all the lands that are reached by the waterways of the Amur, the Ussuri, and the Sungaru, is not prepossessing upon first view. It is a long, straggling collection of little hamlets, connected by a few muddy roads; the distances are magnificent, and suggest that the builders of the city have built for the next and not for the present century, and are endued with a very sanguine appreciation of the probable importance of the place in the generations to come.

There was a charm and freshness in the life of this rude settlement at the junction of the great Siberian rivers which I know not how to express. But I know that a day in Khabarovka was as exhilarating to my mind as a plunge in ice-cold water proves to one accustomed to the tepid enervating baths of the lazy East. Here our race and our people, our civilization and our religion, though transplanted, to be sure, have come to strike deep root, to grow, to broaden and expand, and though exotic, they give every prospect of a permanent, vigorous growth.

Here the Europeans do not come and go, hurried travellers through strange lands, or traders who work and toil and plan and scheme, and then some day sail away, never to return again. In the English and French, the Spanish and the Portuguese, and in the Dutch possessions, though in a less degree, the white men follow each other, flight after flight, like ducks who seek the lowlying paddy-lands where the wild celery grows and fly away when they have eaten their fill.

But here there are no transients; these settlers will never go back to Russia, but they will draw Russia to them in closer union with every decade. These pioneers are great sturdy fellows, capable of bringing the rude land, which has been so long a waste, into subjection, and then to make it produce; from their loins

will spring a race of men born to Eastern conditions, who will control and people this continent as far south as it is habitable for men of our race; and certainly that vast country from the Amur to the Yellow River, and perhaps as far south as the Yang-tze, is as suitable for the conditions of life of the Russians as are the Middle States for us; and their women, too, are women fit for the duties, the responsibilities, and the emergencies of frontier lifegreat, deep-chested women, strong and quick of limb, wearing spurs, and using them, too, as they straddle their ponies man like, and gallop down the unpaved streets to do a little "shopping," with great masses of flaxen hair falling down over their shoulders; and when at home, what a number of babies there are clinging to their short skirts!

There are no windows, no glass, and no shutters as yet in the town, with the exception of a few residences of officials. In the humble dwellings of log and plank and mud which are springing up in hundreds with mushroom rapidity, these

luxuries are unknown, so the intimate life of the home is open to those who walk the streets, as I did, studying the present situation, and drawing from it a horoscope of the future. The women went about their household duties bright and fresh and hopeful, and wearing the

A RIVER SCENE ON THE USSURI.

neat white apron and the many-colored velvet petticoats, and with gay kerchiefs twisted around their heads and hair; and I remember so vividly one of these homely scenes, which I will endeavor to describe, however imperfectly, because I believe that it reveals the essence of the leaven with which Russia is working miracles in East Asia to-day. It was evening, under the smiling image of the Ikon, the protecting saint, which, smiling down upon the humble bed and board of the colonists, faces towards the door, as ever in a Russian home, so that whoever enters may know that he has come among those who believe, and who work and rest under the protection of his covenant. The house before me was very small, belonging evidently to the very poor among the colonists; it was unfinished, as there were still many weeks before the season of the great cold, and through the windows and incomplete walls I could not help seeing, as I passed, the intimate life of the pioneer family. Two little children sat upon logs upturned to serve as chairs, before a

rough-hewn table; the mother, with grave and gentle face, was cutting them slices of their daily bread, so difficult to earn, so sweet to give, and, as I passed on, the father of the household came in from his work, covered with dust, and placed his great hand upon the little heads; then he kissed their buttery mouths, and the good wife sang happily a song of the Volga.

The construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway has proceeded with great rapidity. Some of the obstacles which had to be overcome are so obvious that it is needless to speak of them-such as the immense distances; the absence of all previous ways of communication and transportation; the absence of labor, which had to be brought, as well as the materials used in the construction, from afar; the rigorous climate, and the almost absolute want of the necessities of life along the line of this great highway. The length of this the longest railroad in the world. is set down upon the official chart at 9876 versts, or 10,500 kilometres.* The railways across our continent are not more than half this length, and the *A kilometre is about two-thirds of a mile; a verst is 3501 feet.

Trans-Caspian, which has been built so rapidly, is not over 1500 kilometres. The work was divided into five zones, or sections, of construction, of which three have been completed, one nearly so, and the fourth section, that running along the Amur through the river provinces, 2000 versts in length, has not been even commenced. The work upon this, the least important section of road, is awaiting the developments of the political situation in the East; and in the mean time, for at least six months in the year, when the river is not frozen, the transportation of men and war materials, and even freight, by the river boats, is quite as inexpensive and almost as expeditious as by rail. The following table will fairly show the present status of the work:

well beyond the water-shed of the Ural, and the line that runs from Perm to Ekaterinburg is really a section of the TransSiberian, and should be considered as such; but as it was connected with the European system in the time of Alexander III., and before the colossal road across Asia had been decided upon, it is not so designated.

To reach this great railway from Europe, you can go from Moscow by the Volga steamers to Tcheliabinsk or to Samara-a voyage which is most agreeable in the summer months; or you can go by railway, a journey of 1984 versts, which is made in eighty hours. At Teheliabinsk, the central depot of the eastern end of the line, the greatest activity prevails. along this part of the line the sta tions are large and comfortable, and there are very passable buffets. Through trains are run

ning both east and west three times a

week, and accommodation trains

once a day in each direction; and this is the schedule upon all the completed sections or divisions of the road.

You can travel from Tcheliabinsk

to Omsk in forty-five hours, and you will have then spent one hundred and twenty-five hours in actual travel from Moscow. The trains are made up of carriages in the American style, and with sleepers. These latter are somewhat primitive. Just before the arrival at Omsk you cross the Irtish, one of the great Siberian rivers. The building of this bridge, and its protection against the danger of ice gorges, proved one of the most difficult engineering problems of the work. Upon this section the rails are laid directly upon sand beds, not upon sleepers, and this departure from custom in railway construction is a pronounced success. The railway now goes east to cross the Obi, some one hundred versts south of Tomsk, which is connected by a "feeder," or annex, which is now completed. Of course the work could not have been prosecuted with

such rapidity had it not been for the fact that almost on the whole line grading to any extent was unnecessary. One of the engineers told me that upon level ground one of the construction trains was able to place the rails at the rate of three versts, and sometimes even as many as six versts, a day. Of course the road-bed, under these favorable circumstances, has cost nothing, and was made almost exclusively with pick and shovel. The work has been let out in small sections to contractors, and in the summer of 1896, when the most feverish activity prevailed

A GOLDI VILLAGE ON THE AMUR.

all along the line, there were two hundred thousand men at work upon the uncompleted section. From Krasnoyarsk and Irkutsk the work has been pushed on rapidly. The ground has been levelled and the rails have been laid more than half-way to Lake Baikal. This region is well wooded, an obvious advantage, and though there are four or five rivers to be bridged, the longest will not be over three hundred yards in length. In the third zone, that of the trans-Baikal region, there are special difficulties to be overcome, and the plan by which this will be attempted has not been definitely decided upon. The greatest of these difficulties is how to cross Lake Baikal, which is