t deserves; for
in this case it is the soil, not the administration, that merits all the
credit. In granite-paved Finland, as in limestone-paved Barbados, Nature
has already laid down your road in a way that no human engineering can
rival, and all you have to do is to smooth it to your own liking.

And now the great panorama of the far North--a noble change from the
flat unending monotony of the Russian steppes--begins in all its
splendor. At one moment we are buried in a dark depth of forest, shadowy
and spectral as those which haunt us in the weird outlines of Retzsch;
the next minute we burst upon an open valley, bright with fresh grass,
and with a still, shining lake slumbering in the centre, the whole
picture framed in a background of sombre woods. Here rise giant boulders
of granite, crested with spreading pines--own brothers, perhaps, of the
block dragged hence eighty years ago from which the greatest of Russian
rulers still looks down upon the city that bears his name;[F] there,
bluffs of wooded hill rear themselves above the surrounding sea of
foliage, and at times the roadside is dotted with the little wooden huts
of the natives, whence wooden-faced women, turbaned with colored
handkerchiefs, and white-headed children, in nothing but a short
night-gown with a warm lining of dirt, stare wonderingly at us as we go
striding past. And over all hangs the clear, pearly-gray northern sky.

One hour is past, and still the air keeps moderately fresh, although the
increasing glare warns us that it will be what I once heard a British
tourist call "more hotterer" by and by. So far, however, we have not
turned a hair, and the second hour's work matches the first to an inch.
As we pass through the little hamlet which marks the first quarter of
our allotted distance we instinctively pull out our watches: "Ten miles
in two hours! Not so bad, but we must keep it up."

So we set ourselves to the third hour, and out comes the sun--bright and
beautiful and destroying as Homer's Achilles:

Bright are his rays, but evil fate they send,
And to sad man destroying heat portend.

Hitherto, despite the severity of our pace, we have contrived to keep up
a kind of flying conversation, but now grim silence settles on our way.
There is a point in every match against time when the innate ferocity of
man, called forth by the exercises which civilization has borrowed from
the brute creation, comes to the front in earnest--when your