; the ice has left, upon a background of sand,
patches of clay, which hold the waters of all this countryside in
brown stretches of shallow mere, and in wider extents of marsh and
bog. The rare travellers who explore this confusion of low rounded
swells and flats carry back with them to better lands a picture of one
grossly monotonous type continuing day upon day. Pine and birch woods,
often ordered with the regularity and industry of the German forest
organization, but often also straggling and curiously stunted and
small, break or confuse the view upon either side.

The impression of the district is most clearly conveyed from some
sandy summit, bare of trees, whence a man may overlook, though not
from any great height, the desolate landscape for some miles. He
obtains from such a view neither the sense of forest which wooded
lands of great height convey in spite of their clearings, nor the
sense of endless plain which he would find farther to the east or to
the north. He perceives through the singularly clear air in autumn
brown heaths and plains set here and there with the great stretches of
woodland and farmsteads, the stubble of which is soon confused by the
eye in the distance with the barren heaths around. In winter, the
undulating mass of deep and even snow is marked everywhere by the
small, brown, leafless trees in their great groupings, and by the
pines, as small, and weighted with the burden of the weather; but much
the most striking of the things seen in such a landscape are the
stretches of black water, or, if the season be hard, of black ice
which, save when the snow has recently fallen, fierce winds will
commonly have swept bare.

The military character of such a region will be clear. It is, in the
technical language of military art, a labyrinth of _defiles_. Care has
been expended upon the province, especially in the last two
generations, and each narrow passage between the principal sheets of
water carries a road, often a hard causeway. A considerable system of
railways takes advantage of the same natural narrow issues; but even
to those familiar with the country, the complexity of these narrow dry
gates or defiles, and their comparative rarity (contrasted with the
vast extent of waterlogged soil or of open pool), render an advance
against any opposition perilous, and even an unopposed advance slow,
and dependent upon very careful Staff work. Columns in their progress
are for hours out of touch one wi