IN

Na sentence, Russia is a huge farm, comprising a seventh of the land surface of the globe, and a twenty-sixth of its total area. It has half a dozen men to manage it-according to the policy of one of the six-and the people are divided into ten millions of men and women of the more or less comfortable, more or less educated class, and one hundred and nineteen millions of citizens the mass of whom form the dullest, rudest, least ambitious peasantry in Europe. If one travels over Russia to spy out the land, he may go for days across it from west to east without breaking the continuous view of a flat disk, whose only variety lies between its farmed flatness and its waste flatness, its squat, shrinking, unkempt villages and its sandy districts wooded with thin birch or evergreens.

Every where it is new, rude, and untidy.

Copyright, 1898, by Harper and Brothers. All rights reserved.

Or he may start from the almost limitless forest that belts the north of Russia and Siberia and travel for a greater number of days over a precisely similar flat and tiresome reach of farm-land, everywhere slovenly and unkempt, and varied again by sparse woods and villages of brown thatched huts, each village crowding around a huge white Greek church with Oriental towers and points of gold. Mud roads that are mere rough trails, low-browed, shaggy-haired, dirty men and women, of the intelligent status of Indian squaws, are the only other objects he will

see.

To obtain a view of what any European would honor with the name of scenery he must go to the further boundaries of the European half of the empire -to the lovely wooded and rocky islets and emerald lakes of Finland in the west, to the not very scenically grand Urals in

the east, to the charming hills by the Black Sea in what Russia calls its Riviera, or, further south, to the truly splendid, the magnificent scenery of the Caucasus. But the men of Russia who see the bulk of their country see only the steppes, marshy or sandy in the north, and black and rich in the south, but every where a checker-board of farms and waste places, every where flat as a table, and everywhere untidy, or, where the people congregate together, squalid. There are notable exceptions to this very general rule, and they are the cities. Warsaw is not Russian at all, but Polish, which is to say, eloquent of the best genius of Europe. St. Petersburg is artificial, planned to be an imitation European town, and main tained as such by the government in spite of its still great unpopularity with the mass of the people, even of the most enlightened among them. Moscow is disappointing as a European city, and yet, outside the Kremlin, is nothing else; and Odessa is a very lively modern commercial and cosmopolitan capital. Helsingfors, the Finnish capital, is rather small to put in the list, but it is one of the finest small cities in Europe-and is not Russian. Most of the other cities, small and large, except Nijni-Novgorod, which has been denationalized and rendered excessively commonplace by the government in order to render it the artificial setting for an exotic exposition, are more or less primitive, shabby, dirty, native-Asiatic.

It is of interest for the reader to know how the sight-seer in Russia is welcomed, and in what degree of comfort he travels there. It happened that when I was ready

to start for St. Petersburg from London no one who could have smoothed the way for me was in England. Even the Russian minister was absent, and when I presented to his secretary my letters of introduction he read them mechanically and handed them back, and said, "If your minister in St. Petersburg wishes to make himself responsible for you, he will do so. This embassy knows nothing about you. Yes, I see your letters from your Secretary of State and other prominent Americans, but I know nothing about you."

Finally, when I reached St. Petersburg, Mr. Breckinridge, our minister, was on his holidays in Finland, so that never did tourist enter a foreign country with fewer advantages than I, so far as the Russians were concerned. The tales of the difficulties encountered by the visitor to Russia, of the close surveillance of his movements by the police, and of the facility with which a traveller may subject himself to suspicion and be expelled, or have his passport torn up and himself disappear (in Siberia) as completely as if the earth had swallowed him-such tales now form a considerable literature by themselves; and if a tourist is rendered uneasy by them before he gets to Russia, I can assure him that he will gather enough more of such stories after crossing the frontier to spoil his visit and his rest at night if he be nervous, timid, or extraimaginative. I will not say that the obstruction, surveillance, suspicion, and extraordinary autocratic practices that we have all read and heard about are not there to meet you on the frontier, shadowing you afterwards, investigating your baggage while you sleep, and opening all letters to and from you the rest of the time, but I am compelled to admit that I was unaware of the least part of all this during my travels.

I was never less troubled by foreign customs laws and regulations in any journey I have ever made.

Every man in Russia, and every woman, if she wishes to travel from her town to the next, must have a passport. Ev erybody must have one in order to pass the frontier in either direction. A passport is as necessary to a Russian who desires to return to his native land as it is to an American who wishes to visit that country. Certain classes of officials have special passports that relieve them from the necessity of explaining where they are going when they make a journey in their own country, but these must be carried by them. I fancy that even the members of the Czar's cabinet have to carry passports when they go about Russia. The espionage is very strict in Poland, always very uniform and thorough in Russia proper, and has been very mild and somewhat lax in Finland, whose people gave themselves to the Russian Empire, and were treated with marvellous consideration until a few years ago, when the Russianizing process began, and the conscription law was extended to that splendid European, un-Russian province. When there is any new military improvement or movement afoot, as is now apparently the case in trans-Caspia, the surveillance of travellers becomes very strict. When there is trouble with an unruly population, as was the case in a part of Georgia over the Caucasus when I was there, foreigners are warned away.

I may be mistaken, but it seemed to me that a man might travel in Russia without a passport if he avoided hotels and dwellings, or if he escaped the notice of the

police, or their agents, the door-porters, when entering a friendly residence. It is also possible to leave Russia without a passport if one risks the frontier dangers of sea, forest, wilderness, and desolate expanses and of detection. But taking Russia by and large, in ordinary, peaceful times, the purpose of its strong government, one of whose chief items of expense must be for police service, is to make it impossible to depart, enter, or travel there without a passport.

I entered by steamer from Stockholm, stopping at several Finland ports. I left the ship at each place and roamed about, but as I did not register or put up at any hotel, I was not asked for my passport. As I was booked through to St. Peters

AN IMPERIAL SENTRY.

burg, no customs officer called for it on the ship at any other place. On the ship were three women who were doing one of those irregular, unnecessary, risky things that members of their lovely sex are more given to doing than men. They had slipped out of Finland without permission, and were coming back into Russia without having had their passports vised where they had travelled. Two, a married French woman and her English companion, had been holidaying in Finland, and had run over to Stockholm to see the World's Fair. The other, a Polish Jewess, had slipped out and gone to Paris. There must have been grave dereliction to make this possible.. All three had taken tickets back to a Finland port, and then bought new tickets from that port to St. Petersburg in order to deceive the Russian police, and to enable the ship-captain, whose services they easily enlisted, to tell a white lie, and say they came only from the Russian port where they bought their last tickets. Nevertheless, they were dreadfully alarmed at what might happen at St. Petersburg; and I, with a head full of sensational stories of Russian strictness and severity and of Russian prejudice against journalists, was interested in my own fate-in a journalistic way-i. e., like one who stands apart and watches what happens to himself.

Nothing happened. If my trunk and big portmanteau had been filled with dynamite bombs, the Russians would not have discovered it, for they did not take the trouble to examine my luggage.

As soon as our ship was tied to the wharf a very dandified officer of middle age, accompanied by a clerk, hurried into the dining-saloon and sat down at a table, upon which a waiter had laid an ink-pot and a pen. "Get the people in line," said the officer. His manner was that of a man who is already late for a dinner party and is being still longer delayed. He seized the first passport and stabbed the ink pot with his pen. The bottle gave out a hollow dry sound of emptiness, and from that instant the laws, the watchfulness, and the majesty of Russia took a back seat, behind and subordinate to the petty annoyance the ink-bottle caused. The officer stabbed the bottle hard, tried to write, stabbed the bottle harder, made an incoherent illegible flourish of broken lines on the first passport, fumed, stabbed the bottle still harder, seized the next passport, and began to damn everything around him. The line filed before him eagerly, seeing how engrossed he was with his misfortune. New passports were pressed upon him. He ground his pen around and around in the nearly dry bottle, and groaned, and cursed the

ship. examine a passport except to find the place for his signature, whereupon each time he clutched the bottle in one hand, and with the pen in his other hand tried to dig out its bottom. At last he damned his clerk, who then for the first time took notice of the trouble, and went off to get the captain's ink. It was like a bit of a play to see the Polish Jewess wriggle ahead of her place to get her passport

He did not

signed before the fresh ink came and while the officer was in the heat of his fracas with the bottle. The husband of the French woman with the English companion had come aboard, and it was he who presented the passports of the law-breaking women. He was a person of consequence in diplomatic circles, and tried to impress the officer with the air of a man of affairs engaging in a tedious formality. "Kindly sign this-ladies in my charge-a cab waits," said he, in French.

"I am permitted to have only half a drop of ink," said the officer, now red

THE ESPLANADE, HELSINGFORS.

faced, grinding the pen in the bottle as a chemist uses a pestle in a mortar.

I waited till the last-till he got fresh ink and plenty, and calmed himself and squared off at the table with a sigh of relief. If the runaways from Russia had come up then, he would have questioned them-perhaps convicted them with the things from Stockholm and Paris in their boxes. But it was my turn, and my own passport so surprised him by its novelty that he studied its big eagle and its engraved flourishes, and then looked at me and said, "Americansky," and bowed as if I had gained some admirable quality

by merely coming a great distance, as tea and ostrich feathers did before the days of steam.

My Murray's Guide had told me that I must get a new passport-with new in italics - and yet my old one, all frescoed with Turkish hieroglyphics made in Edhem Pasha's train, had served very well. My Murray next said that the customs examinations were very strict, and that the tourist would find it wisest and quickest to exercise a great deal of patience. So I held my breath for this grand test of quality