rth the Polar sea and the lakes and rivers near it supply the rain
and snow-clouds. As they sweep toward the south these clouds hourly
become less and their last drops are wrung from them as they strike
the slopes of the mountains and settle about their crests. The winter
clouds from the Indian Ocean and Caspian Sea rarely pass the desert of
Gobi, and thus the country of the Trans-Baikal has a climate peculiar
to itself.

During my stay at Chetah a party was organized to hunt gazelles. There
were ten or fifteen officers and about twenty Cossacks, as at
Blagoveshchensk. Up to the day of the excursion the weather was
delightful, but it suddenly changed to a cloudy sky, a high wind, and
a freezing temperature. The scene of action was a range of hills five
or six miles from town. We went there in carriages and wagons and on
horseback, and as we shivered around a fire built by the Cossacks near
an open work cabin, we had little appearance of a pleasure party.

[Illustration: ON THE HILLS NEAR CHETAH.]

The first drive resulted in the death of two rabbits and the serious
disability of a third. One halted within twenty steps of me and
received the contents of my gun-barrel. I reloaded while he lay
kicking, and just as I returned the ramrod to its place the beast
rose and ran into the thick bushes. I hope he recovered and will live
many years. He seemed gifted with a strong constitution, and I heard
several stories of the tenacity of life displayed by his kindred.

The rabbit or hare (_lepus variabilis_) abounds in the valley of the
Amoor and generally throughout Siberia. He is much larger than the New
England rabbit I hunted in my boyhood, and smaller than the long-eared
rabbit of the Rocky Mountains and California. He is grey or brown in
summer and white in winter, his color changing as cold weather begins.
No snow had fallen at Chetah, but the rabbits were white as chalk and
easily seen if not easily killed. The peasants think the rabbit a
species of cat and refuse to eat his flesh, but the upper classes have
no such scruples. I found him excellent in a roast or stew and
admirably adapted to destroying appetites. Our day's hunt brought us
one gazelle, six rabbits, one lunch, several drinks, and one smashed
wagon.

I saw at Chetah a chess board in a box ten inches square with a
miniature tree six inches high on its cover. The figure of a man in
chains leaning upon a spade near a wheelbarrow, stood under the tree.
The ex