from one village to another. As these free horses are generally better fed and in better condition than the overdriven animals at the post stations, it is often advantageous to employ them; and your driver, as you approach a village, will almost always turn around and inquire whether he shall take you to the Government post station or to the house of a "friend." Traveling with drushkí, or "friends," costs no more than traveling by post, and it enables one to see much more of the domestic life of the Siberian peasants than one could see by stopping and changing horses only at regular post stations.
The first part of our journey from Tiumén to Omsk was comparatively uneventful and uninteresting. The road ran across a great marshy plain, full of swampy lakes, and covered with a scattered growth of willow and alder bushes, small birch-trees, and scrubby firs and pines, which in every direction limited the vision and hid the horizon line. All this part of the province of Tobólsk seems to have been, within a comparatively recent geological period, the bottom of a great inland sea which united the Caspian and the Sea of Aral with the arctic ocean, along the line of the shallow depression through which now flow the rivers Írtish and Ob. Everywhere between Tiumén and Omsk we saw evidences, in the shape of sand-banks, salt-marshes, beds of clay, and swampy lakes, to show that we were traveling over a partly dried up sea bottom.
About a hundred versts from Tiumén, just beyond the village of Zavódo-ukófskaya, we stopped for two hours early in the evening at the residence and estate of a wealthy Siberian manufacturer named Kolmakóf, to whom I had a letter of introduction from a Russian friend. I was surprised to find in this remote part of the world so many evidences of comfort, taste, and luxury as were to be seen in and about Mr. Kolmakóf's house. The house itself was only a two-story building of logs, but it was large and comfortably furnished, and its windows looked out over an artificial lake,
