A Russian village and military post seventeen miles below the mouth of the Songaree is named Michael Semenof, in honor of the Governor General of Eastern Siberia.  We landed before the commandant’s house, where two iron guns pointed over the river in the direction of China.  However threatening they appeared I was informed they were unserviceable for purposes of war, and only employed in firing salutes.  A military force was maintained there, and doubtless kept a sharp watch over the Chinese frontier.

The soldiers appeared under good sanitary regulations, and the quarters of the Commandant indicated an appreciation of the comforts of life.  The peasants that gathered on the bank were better dressed than those of Petrovsky and other villages.  The town is on a plain covered with a scattered growth of oaks.  Below this place the wood furnished us was generally ash or poplar; here it was oak, somewhat gnarly and crooked, but very good for steamboat fuel.  One design of the colonization of the Amoor is to furnish a regular supply of wood to the government steamers.  The peasants cut the wood and bring it to the bank of the river.  Private steamers pay cash for what they purchase; the captains of the government boats gives vouchers for the wood they take, and these vouchers are redeemed at the end of the season of navigation.  About sixty thousand roubles worth of wood is consumed annually by government, and twelve thousand on private account.

While the boat took wood Borasdine and I resumed our hunting, he carrying a shot-gun and I an opera glass; with this division of labor we managed to bag a single snipe and kill another, which was lost in the river.  My opera glass was of assistance in finding the birds in the grass; they were quite abundant almost within rifle-shot of town, and it seemed strange that the officers of the post did not devote their leisure to snipe hunting.

Our snipe was cooked, for dinner, and equalled any I ever saw at Delmonico’s.  We had a wild goose at the same meal, and after a careful trial I can pronounce the Siberian goose an edible bird.  He is not less cunning than wild geese elsewhere, but with all his adroitness he frequently falls into the hands of man and graces his dinner table.

On the northern horizon, twenty or thirty miles from Michael Semenof, there is a range of high and rugged mountains.  As we left the town, near the close of day, the clouds broke in the west and the sunshine lighted up these mountains and seemed to lift them above their real position.  With the red and golden colors of the clouds; the lights and shadows of the mountains; the yellow forests of autumn, and the green plains near the river; the stillness broken only by our own motion or the rippling of the river, the scene was ‘most fair to look upon.’  I have never seen sunsets more beautiful than those of the Amoor.

[Illustration:  ARMED AND EQUIPPED.]