isonment (and worse) on these desolate
shores throughout the entire summer. So I purchased revolvers, two
rifles and a fowling-piece at about five times their usual cost, and
hoped that our troubles were over, at least for the present. I should
add that the arms had left London six weeks previously, and that I was
furnished with a special permit to introduce them into the country. But
Russian methods are peculiar, and fortunately unique, I was unaware
before our departure of the fact that if a gun is consigned direct from
its English maker to a gunsmith in Russia it goes through without any
trouble whatsoever. Otherwise, it may take six months or more to reach
its destination.

The New Year was passed in Moscow, and a gloomy one it was. From an
historical and picturesque point of view the city is intensely
interesting, but otherwise it is a dull, dreary place. Russian cities,
not excepting Petersburg, generally are, although the English novelist
generally depicts them as oases of luxurious splendour, where love and
Nihilism meet one at every turn, and where palaces, diamonds and silver
sleigh-bells play an important part, to say nothing of that journalistic
trump card, the Secret Police! I wish one of these imaginative scribes
could spend a winter evening (as I have so often done) in a stuffy hotel
reading-room, with a _Times_ five days old, wondering whether the
Russians will ever provide a theatre sufficiently attractive to tempt a
stranger out of doors after nightfall. In summer it is less dismal;
there are gardens and restaurants, dancing gipsies and Hungarian
Tziganes, but even then the entertainment is generally so poor, and the
surroundings so tawdry, that one is glad to leave them at an early hour
and go sadly to bed.

The distance from Moscow to Irkutsk is a little under 4000 English
miles, the first-class fare a little over a hundred roubles (or about
L12), which, considering the journey occupies nine days or more, is
reasonable enough. There are, or were, two trains a week,--the "State"
and Wagonlits expresses, which run alternately. The former is a
Government train, inferior in every respect to the latter, which is
quite as luxurious in its service and appointments as the trains run by
the same company in Europe.

At 10 P.M., on January 4, we left Moscow, in a blinding snowstorm, a
mild foretaste of the Arctic blizzards to come, which would be
experienced without the advantage of a warm and well-lit compa