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OUR LAST DAYS IN SIBERIA
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and that, if we desired it, an excursion to one of their villages might easily be arranged. I replied that we should be very glad to make such an excursion, and it was decided at once that we should go on the following day to the Akúnefski ulús, a settlement of Káchinski Tatárs about fifteen versts from Minusínsk on the river Abakán.

After making a comprehensive but rather hasty survey of the whole museum, Mr. Frost and I decided that the departments of archæology and ethnology were its most striking and interesting features, but that it was a very creditable exhibition throughout, and an honor to its founder and to the town. Its collections, at the time of our visit, filled seven rooms in the building of the town council, and were numbered up to 23,859 in the catalogue, while the number of volumes in its library was nearly 10,000. All this was the direct result of the efforts of a single individual, who had, at first, very little public sympathy or encouragement, who was almost destitute of pecuniary means, and who was confined ten or twelve hours every day in a drug-store. Since my return from Siberia the directors of the museum, with the aid of I. M. Sibíriakóf, Inokénti Kuznetsóf, and a few other wealthy and cultivated Siberians, have published an excellent descriptive catalogue of the archæological collection, with an atlas of lithographic illustrations, and have erected a spacious building for the accommodation of the museum and library at a cost of 12,000 or 15,000 rúbles. The catalogue and atlas, which have elicited flattering comments from archæological societies in the various capitals of Europe, possess an added interest for the reason that they are wholly the work of political exiles. The descriptive text, which fills nearly 200 octavo pages, is from the pen of the accomplished geologist and archæologist Dmítri Kléments, who was banished to Eastern Siberia for "political untrustworthiness" in 1881, while the illustrations for the atlas were drawn by the exiled artist A. V. Stankévich. It has been said again and again by defenders