eir similarity and monotony. Just
one week after our departure from Barnaool we observed that the houses
were constructed of pine instead of birch, and the country began to
change in character. At a station where a fiery-tempered woman
required us to pay in advance for our horses, we were only twenty
versts from Tumen.

It is but a step from the sublime to the ridiculous, and it is only a
steppe (a thousand miles wide) between Tomsk and Tumen. Travelers from
Irkutsk to St. Petersburg consider their journey pretty nearly
accomplished on getting thus far along. The Siberians make light of
distances that would frighten many Americans. "From Tumen you will
have only sixteen hundred versts to the end of the railway," said a
gentleman to me one day. A lady at Krasnoyarsk said I ought to wait
until spring and visit her gold mines. I asked their locality, and
received the reply, "Close by here; only four hundred versts away. You
can go almost there in a carriage, and will have only a hundred and
twenty versts on horseback."

The best portion of Tumen is on a bluff eighty or a hundred feet above
the river Tura. The lower town spreads over a wide meadow, and its
numerous windmills at once reminded me of Stockton, California. We
happened to arrive on market day, when the peasants from the
surrounding country were gathered in all their glory for purposes of
traffic. How such a lot of merchandise of nearly every kind under the
Siberian sun could find either buyer or seller, it is difficult to
imagine. The market-place was densely thronged, but there seemed to be
very little traffic in progress.

The population of Tumen is about twenty thousand, and said to be
rapidly increasing. The town is prosperous, as its many new and
well-built houses bear witness. It has shorn Tobolsk of nearly all her
commerce, and left her to mourn her former greatness. It is about
three hundred versts from the ridge of the Urals, and at the head of
navigation on the Tura. Half a dozen steamers were frozen in and
awaited the return of spring, their machinery being stored to prevent
its rusting.

In the public square of Tumen there was a fountain, the first I saw in
Siberia. Men, women, boys, and girls were filling buckets and barrels,
which they dragged away on sleds.

When we returned from our drive, and were seated at dinner, the cook
brought a quantity of "Tumen carpets" for sale. He used all his
eloquence upon me, but in vain. These carpets were m