less fréquent, but, on the other hand, Ravens and Magpies were much commoner, and Jackdaws remained as numerous as ever. I noticed several small birds which I had not seen before-Greenfinches, Yellow-Hammers, Marsh Tits, and one or two Jays.

A few stages before reaching Ekatereenburg we left the last hill of the Urals behind us, and an easy slope brought us out of the forests to a more cultivated and level country, in which the villages were more plentiful. As we passed the granite pillar which marks the boundary line between the two continents, we hoped that we had left the mists and fogs of Europe behind us to enter the pure dry climate of Asia. We reached Ekatereenburg on the morning of Sunday the 18th inst., having been 123 hours sledging 628 miles, about five miles an hour, including stoppages. We changed horses sixty-five times. Ekatereenburg has about 30,000 inhabitants. We were most hospitably entertained by M. George Onésime Clerc, the head of the Observatory at Ekatereenburg, to whom I had a letter of introduction from M. Bogdanoff, of St. Petersburg; we also visited M. Vinebourg, an official of the telegraph office and an excellent amateur ornithologist, who went with us to the museum.

Time did not, however, admit of our making much delay. We were anxious to cover as much ground as possible whilst the frost lasted, and we bade a hasty adieu to our friends. The same afternoon we took a padarozhna for Tyu-main', and made the 306 versts, or 204 miles, in twelve stages, which we accomplished in thirty-nine hours. The country was gently undulating, well wooded, with numerous villages.

We spent a couple of days at Tyu-main' enjoying the hospitality of Mr. Wardroper, a Scotch engineer; with him we visited M. Ignatieff, and lunched at his house with some of the merchants of this thriving place. The river was full of steamers, all frozen up in their winter quarters, and everything told of commerce and wealth. The house of Ivan Ivanovich Ignatieff was a handsome mansion elegantly furnished in the German style, just such a house as a North German family with an income of 6007. or 7007. a year would inhabit. We had a quiet but substantial luncheon, roast beef and claret, roast grouse and sherry, ice cream and champagne. One of the guests was a magnificent specimen of a Russian, standing 6 ft. 8 in., and weighing, we were told, twenty-two stone.

From Tyu-main' to Omsk is 637 versts, which we accomplished in sixty-two hours, changing horses twenty-seven times. It was quite holiday travelling; we had good horses and excellent roads. The scene was entirely changed. We were now crossing the great steppes of western Siberia. We had left the Peak of Derbyshire behind us, and were traversing an almost boundless Salisbury Plain. For nearly a thousand miles hardly anything was to be seen but an illimitable level expanse of pure white snow. Above us was a canopy of brilliantly blue sky, and alongside of us a line of telegraph poles crossing from one horizon to the other. Occasionally we came upon a small plantation of stunted birches, and every fifteen to twenty miles we changed horses at some village built on the banks of a frozen river whose waters find their way into the Obb beneath their thick

armour of ice. These villages were almost entirely built of wood, floated down in rafts from the forests on the distant hills. Most of them were Russian, with a large stone or brick church in the centre, and a gilt cross on the steeple. Others were Tartar villages, where the crescent occupied the place of the cross; and it was somewhat humiliating to us as Christians to find that the cross was too often the symbol of drunkenness, disorder, dilapidation, and comparative poverty, whereas the crescent was almost invariably the sign of sobriety, order, enterprise, and prosperity. The general opinion amongst the better educated Russians with whom I was able to converse, was, that the chief fault lay with the priests, who encouraged idleness and drunkenness, whilst the Mohamedan clergy threw the whole of their influence into the opposite scale. Living is so extravagantly cheap in this part of the world, that the ordinary incentives to industry scarcely exist. We were able to buy beef at twopence per pound, and grouse at sevenpence a brace. We had a very practical demonstration that we were in a land flowing with hay and corn, in the price we paid for our horses. Our sledge was what is called a "tro'-i-ka," and required three horses. Up to Tyu-main' these horses had cost us sixpence a mile. On the steppes the price suddenly fell to threehalfpence, i.e. a halfpenny a horse a mile. a horse a mile. At one of the villages where we stopped to change horses it was marketday, and we found on inquiry that a ton of wheat might be purchased for the same amount as a hundred-weight cost in England.

Whilst we were crossing the steppes we saw very few

birds. The almost total absence of trees and the depth of the snow upon the ground is, of course, a sufficient explanation why birds cannot live there in winter. Occasionally we saw small flocks of Snow-Buntings, whose only means of subsistence appeared to be what they could pick up from the droppings of the horses on the road. These charming little birds often enlivened the tedium of the journey as we watched them flitting before the sledge, as we disturbed them at their meals. They were rapidly losing their winter dress. They only moult once in the year: in autumn. In winter the general colour of the Snow-Bunting is a buffish brown. After the autumn moult each feather has a more or less broad fringe of buffish brown, which almost obscures the colour of the feather lying below it. The nuptial plumage is assumed in spring by the casting of these fringes, which appear to dry up and drop off, whilst at the same time the feathers appear to acquire new life and the colour to intensify, as if in spring there was a fresh flow of blood into the feathers, somewhat analogous to the rising of the sap in trees, which causes a fresh deposit of colouring matter. The Snow-Buntings we saw on the snow-track across the steppes had nearly lost all the brown from their plumage, their backs were nearly black, as were also the primary quills of their wings, whilst the head and under-parts were nearly as white as the snow itself, and at a distance one might often fancy that a flock of black butterflies were dancing before us. The Snow-Bunting had an additional charm for us from the fact that it is a winter visitor to England, whose arrival is always looked for with interest, and a few pairs even

remain to breed in the north of Scotland. Otherwise, the Snow-Bunting is remarkable as being the most northerly of all passerine birds in its breeding range, having been found throughout the Arctic Circle wherever land is known to exist. The only other birds we saw on the steppes were a few Sparrows, Jackdaws, and Hooded Crows in the villages. The Bullfinches and the Tits disappeared with the trees, and the summer birds had not yet arrived, though Mr. Wardroper at Tyu-main' told us that Starlings, Rooks, Geese, and Ducks were all overdue. It was, perhaps, fortunate for us that the season was an unusually late one, otherwise the roads might have been in many places impassable.