In a clear morning or evening of the coldest days the smoke from the chimneys in the villages rises very slowly.  Gaining a certain height, it spreads out as if unable to ascend farther.  It is always light in color and density, and when touched by the sun’s rays appears faintly crimsoned or gilded.  Once when we reached a small hill dominating a village, I could see the cloud of smoke below me agitated like the ground swell of the ocean.  I had only a moment to look upon it ere we descended to the level of the street.

I have not recorded the incidents of each day on the steppe in chronological order, on account of their similarity and monotony.  Just one week after our departure from Barnaool we observed that the houses were constructed of pine instead of birch, and the country began to change in character.  At a station where a fiery-tempered woman required us to pay in advance for our horses, we were only twenty versts from Tumen.

It is but a step from the sublime to the ridiculous, and it is only a steppe (a thousand miles wide) between Tomsk and Tumen.  Travelers from Irkutsk to St. Petersburg consider their journey pretty nearly accomplished on getting thus far along.  The Siberians make light of distances that would frighten many Americans.  “From Tumen you will have only sixteen hundred versts to the end of the railway,” said a gentleman to me one day.  A lady at Krasnoyarsk said I ought to wait until spring and visit her gold mines.  I asked their locality, and received the reply, “Close by here; only four hundred versts away.  You can go almost there in a carriage, and will have only a hundred and twenty versts on horseback.”

The best portion of Tumen is on a bluff eighty or a hundred feet above the river Tura.  The lower town spreads over a wide meadow, and its numerous windmills at once reminded me of Stockton, California.  We happened to arrive on market day, when the peasants from the surrounding country were gathered in all their glory for purposes of traffic.  How such a lot of merchandise of nearly every kind under the Siberian sun could find either buyer or seller, it is difficult to imagine.  The market-place was densely thronged, but there seemed to be very little traffic in progress.

The population of Tumen is about twenty thousand, and said to be rapidly increasing.  The town is prosperous, as its many new and well-built houses bear witness.  It has shorn Tobolsk of nearly all her commerce, and left her to mourn her former greatness.  It is about three hundred versts from the ridge of the Urals, and at the head of navigation on the Tura.  Half a dozen steamers were frozen in and awaited the return of spring, their machinery being stored to prevent its rusting.

In the public square of Tumen there was a fountain, the first I saw in Siberia.  Men, women, boys, and girls were filling buckets and barrels, which they dragged away on sleds.