Next to him is seated the principal--a hearty-looking man, dressed, as usual, in military uniform--and other visitors, for this is evidently an examination day. A teacher stands at the blackboard, and perhaps has asked a question which the lad before him has been unable to answer, for he has turned to another boy, who has risen at his desk as though to give the needed reply. One need not go outside our Yankee school-rooms to make a similar picture any day; but he would never see in this country the _abacus_, which is used all over Siberia, China, and Japan by pupils and teachers in their arithmetic lessons, and by merchants in their stores, instead of the pencil and paper with which we do sums too large for head-work. It is a very ancient device, and the boys who went to school in Rome before Cæsar wrote that all Gaul was divided into three parts, or Virgil declared "_Arma virumque cano_," learned their multiplication table by the help of its sliding balls. [Illustration: THE SKATING-POND.] The military rule that governs all Russia extends to the schools and colleges. They are free public schools, almost as fully as with us, and are attended by the children of the peasants and poor townspeople as well as by the sons of government officials and rich merchants, who later are to go to the university at Tomsk, or perhaps to Russia, for their college course. But here, though some are nobles by birth and others are mere peasants, all are treated exactly alike, and all dress in a uniform closely copied from that of the army. Even the girls--who always have separate schools from the boys--wear a simple regulation dress, so that there is no heart-burning in little Anna, from the cottage in the back street, because little Lady Anna, from the great house on the square, has a fine dress. The teachers are all regarded as officers of the government, and wear a military uniform. The school is drilled in tactics every day, and conducts all its exercises after military models, training its boys into soldierly young men. Even their play is mixed up with this, as you see in the picture of the ring game, where an officer wearing his sword stands in the centre. The uniform is not so pretty as that worn by the cadets of our own military schools, and it is comical to see a little chap, with a round, roguish face under his flat cap, wearing big boots, and a gray overcoat belted about him with skirts long enough to touch the ground; but when he has earned the rank of corporal or sergeant in his school battalion, and feels the marks of his rank on his collar, he struts about as proud as a peacock.