rtment to
view them from. For this train was truly an ambulant palace of luxury.
An excellent restaurant, a library, pianos, baths, and last, but not
least, a spacious and well-furnished compartment with every comfort,
electric and otherwise (and without fellow travellers), rendered this
first "etape" of our great land journey one to recall in after days with
a longing regret. But we had nearly a fortnight of pleasant travel
before us and resolved to make the most of it. Fortunately the train was
not crowded. Some cavalry officers bound for Manchuria, three or four
Siberian merchants and their families, and a few Tartars of the better
class. The officers were capital fellows, full of life and gaiety
(Russian officers generally are), the merchants and their women-folk
sociable and musically inclined. Nearly every one spoke French, and the
time passed pleasantly enough, for although the days were terribly
monotonous, evenings enlivened by music and cards, followed by cheery
little suppers towards the small hours, almost atoned for their hours of
boredom.

Nevertheless, I cannot recommend this railway journey, even as far as
Irkutsk, to those on pleasure bent, for the Trans-Siberian is no tourist
line, notwithstanding the alluring advertisements which periodically
appear during the holiday season. Climatically the journey is a
delightful one in winter time, for Siberia is then at its best--not the
Siberia of the English dramatist: howling blizzards, chained convicts,
wolves and the knout, but a smiling land of promise and plenty even
under its limitless mantle of snow. The landscape is dreary, of course,
but most days you have the blue cloudless sky and dazzling sunshine, so
often sought in vain on the Riviera. At mid-day your sunlit compartment
is often too warm to be pleasant, when outside it is 10 deg. below zero.
But the air is too dry and bracing for discomfort, although the pleasant
breeze we are enjoying here will presently be torturing unhappy mortals
in London in the shape of a boisterous and biting east wind. On the
other hand, the monotony after a time becomes almost unbearable. All day
long the eye rests vacantly upon a dreary white plain, alternating with
green belts of woodland, while occasionally the train plunges into dense
dark pine forest only to emerge again upon the same eternal "plateau" of
silence and snow. Now and again we pass a village, a brown blur on the
limitless white, rarely a town, a few wood