There were no Americans on this Murman railway front, except two companies of railway transportation troops, which reached Russia in April and were the last to leave in July, 1919. [Illustration: Patrols with webfoot snowshoes went forth on the snow] Beyond the Murman and the Vologda railways, the only other highway to the interior is the Dvina, a dirty colored, broad spreading river, which from its beginning, as the Witchega, at the base of the Timan Range in Vologda province, follows a swift flowing course one thousand miles northwest to the sea at Archangel. Sometimes, when its banks are low and it sprawls out in play, its waters glide noiselessly with a look of gentleness and peace, and the Dvina puts one in mind of our Mississippi; but usually its cold depths are freighted with grave mystery and melancholy foreboding, and then it is the spirit of Russia, hurrying by forested shores and high, desolate bluffs, where a mill, near a huddle of soiled log houses, flaps its clumsy, wooden wings, and a white church, with fantastic minaret, rears aloof, chaste and austere, in the midst of squalor. During the period of navigable water, in the days of peace, the Dvina was plied by steamers and barges and watercraft of every description, but the freeze commences in early November, and then, until the last days of May, its waters have become a bed of thick ice. Then, except by the Vologda railway, the only method of transportation between Archangel and the interior is by sledges, drawn over the snow by little shaggy ponies that can perform miracles of labor and seem impervious to the terrible, cold winds. These ponies are the embodiment of the moujik temperament, docile and mild mannered, very patient and long suffering, and never resentful of the most severe chastisement. The whole province is a plain of low, gentle slopes, covered with small fir trees and several varieties of dwarfed pine. A long, dormant season and the severity of winter preclude any luxuriant, ligneous growth. Even the underbrush is sparse and thinly scattered, and commercially, about the only value of the Archangel forests is for the manufacture of pulp. The bottom of this spindly pine woods is covered with a tundra. Sometimes, there are patches of waist deep water, and in other places, a morass that seems bottomless. Such is the character of all the North Russian forests. The natives tell stories of men, unfamiliar with the country, who have lost their way and floundered in these treacherous marshes until they passed from sight without a sign of their passage.