free
drinkers at home adhere quite closely to tea on the road. The merchant
traveler drinks enormous quantities, and I have seen a couple of these
worthies empty a twenty cup samovar with no appearance of surfeit. So
much hot liquid inside generally sets them into a perspiration.
Nothing but loaf sugar is used, and there is a very common practice of
holding a lump in one hand and following a sip of the unsweetened tea
with a nibble at the sugar. When several persons are engaged in this
rasping process a curious sound is produced.

There are many Tartars living on the steppe, but we saw very little of
them, as our changes were made at the Russian villages. Before the
reign of Catherine II. there was but a small population between Tumen
and Tomsk, and the road was more a fiction than a fact. The Governor
General of Siberia persuaded Catherine to let him have all conscripts
of one levy instead of sending them to the army. He settled them in
villages along the route over the steppe, and the wisdom of his policy
was very soon apparent. The present population is made up of the
descendants of these and other early settlers, together with exiles
and voluntary emigrants of the present century. Several villages have
a bad reputation, and I heard stories of robbery and murder. In
general the dwellers on the steppe are reputable, and they certainly
impressed me favorably.

I was told by a Russian that Catherine once thought of giving the
Siberians a constitution somewhat like that of the United States of
America, but was dissuaded from so doing by one of her ministers.

[Illustration: WOMEN SPINNING.]

The villages were generally built each in a single street, or at most,
in two streets. The largest houses had yards, or enclosures, into
which we drove when stopping for breakfast or dinner. The best windows
were of glass or talc, fixed in frames, and generally made double. The
poorer peasants contented themselves with windows of ox or cow
stomachs, scraped thin and stretched in drying. There were no iron
stoves In any house I visited, the Russian _peitcha_ or brick stove
being universal. Very often we found the women and girls engaged in
spinning. No wheel is used for this purpose, the entire apparatus
being a hand spindle and a piece of board. The flax is fastened on an
upright board, and the fingers of the left hand gather the fibres and
begin the formation of a thread. The right hand twirls the spindle,
and by skillful manip