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Scores of nights during our explorations in Siberia, we should have been compelled to camp without fire, water, or warm food, had not Nature provided everywhere an abundance of trailing-pine, and stored it away under the snow for the use of travellers.

The Mahrattas have the Chikara, or Ravine-deer, a species peculiar to the rocky hills of the Deccan. China is not without its representative in the Whang-yang, or yellow-goat, which also inhabits the arid deserts of Central Asia, Thibet, and Southern Siberia.

"And what is that?" asked Septimius. "Sanguinea sanguinissima" said the doctor; "it has no vulgar name; but it produces a very beautiful flower, which I have never seen, though some seeds of it were sent me by a learned friend in Siberia.

Many of them have become wealthy through gold mining, commerce, and agriculture, and occupy positions they never could have obtained had they lived in European Russia. I know a merchant whose fortune is counted by millions, and who is famous through Siberia for his enterprise and generosity. He is the son of an exiled serf and has risen by his own ability.

The industry is still only in its infancy. In the Tobol and Ishim plains of western Siberia are the fertile black-earth regions covering twenty-five million acres. As yet, they are sparsely settled, but they are capable of supporting half the population of Russia.

Arriving in just twenty hours, they ran across on an electric ferry-boat, capable of carrying several dozen cars, to East Cape, Siberia, and then, by running as far north as possible, had a short cut to Europe. The Patagonians went by the all-rail Intercontinental Line, without change of cars, making the run of ten thousand miles in forty hours.

The fir forests of the Japanese portion, covering more than three million acres, are alone estimated to be worth forty-five million dollars, to say nothing about the extensive coal deposits and the large areas of land available for tillage. Of the native peoples of northern Siberia the Yakuts are the most numerous. They resemble both the Eskimos and the Lapps.

Of the rest of what is now Europe there were merely large islands one on the border of England and Wales, others in France, Spain, and Southern Germany. Asia was represented by a large area in China and Siberia, and an island or islands on the site of India. Very little of Africa or South America existed.

He started off by train to Kharbarovsk, where he got in touch with the Governor-General of Eastern Siberia, General Unterberger, who helped him immensely, got him a good travelling sledge for the trip down the Amur River to Nikolievsk, and wrote a letter which he gave Meares to show at the post-houses and whenever in difficulties.

He, in common with all Americans who had seen the Japanese methods of frightfulness in Siberia, was filled with hatred. "One night," he said, "a company of Japanese soldiers entered the little village six hundred miles north of Vladivostok where we were located. They announced that they were hunting for Bolsheviks.