out the news that the northern swamps and rivulets were putting on their winter pelts and that it was time for all feathered creatures to be away to the south. As I watched again with never-tiring enthusiasm this migration of the birds, I looked with longing at the leather case in which my shotgun lay, impatiently waiting for the days of the autumn chase.
We pitched our camp in a little village near the point where the Tolo joins the Nonni. The rather high eastern spurs of the Great Khingans reached down nearly to the river bank, and out from the valleys and gullies between these mountain shoulders many little streams ran down into the Tolo, forming a whole network of waterways across a marshy plain that was overgrown with high grass, dotted everywhere with clumps of bushes coming up out of the bog.
Several times I crossed these bogs on my way to the mountains, where I found outcrops of coal in the steep slopes that was of so good a quality that I ordered prospecting work to be undertaken to determine the thickness and direction of the seams and the quantity available.
While Rusoff and Gorloff superintended these operations, I took advantage of the opportunity to visit the neighbouring country. Inasmuch as the pain in my leg prevented me from riding, I had to go about in a cart and usually took the captain of the steamer and a Cossack along with me as an escort. We visited the plain lying between the rivers Tolo and Chor, both affluents of the Nonni, and found that two low, almost bare, foothills of the Great Khingans reach down into it. Everywhere we came across wide expanses of kaoliang fields, dotted with rather prosperous-looking Chinese villages, set in circles of tall, old trees. We had often to cross brooks and small rivers, whose banks were overgrown
