The character of a nation can scarcely fail to be affected by the size of the country it inhabits, and a certain indifference to time and distance is produced by this circumstance. There is also a peculiar apathy as regards small annoyances and casualties. Whatever accident befalls the Russian of the lower orders, his habitual remark is "_Nitchivo_" ("It is nothing"). Nevertheless, Northern blood and a Northern climate have mixed a marvellous amount of energy and enterprise with this Oriental characteristic. Take for example the Caspian railway, undertaken by General Annenkoff. This general completes fifteen hundred miles of railway in the incredibly short space of time of a year and a half, and almost before the public is aware of its having been commenced, he is back again in St. Petersburg dancing at a Court ball in a quadrille opposite the Empress. The railway made by him runs at present from the Caspian Sea to the Amou-Daria River, and will be continued to Bokhara, Samarkand, and Tashkend, in a northerly direction, while on the south it is to enter Persia. Should European complications, by removing the risk of foreign interposition, make it possible for a Russian army to reach the Caspian by way of the Black Sea and the Caucasus, this railway gives it the desired approach to India. By attacking us in India, which they possibly do not desire to conquer, the Panslavists and Russian enthusiasts believe they would establish their empire at Constantinople, and unite the whole Sclav race under the dominion of the Tsar. The one preponderating impression produced by a short visit to Russia is an almost bewildering sense of its vastness, with an equally bewildering feeling of astonishment at the centralization of all government in the hands of the Emperor. This impression is perhaps increased by the nature of the town of St. Petersburg. Long, broad streets, lit at night by the electric light, huge buildings, public and private, large and almost deserted places or squares, all tend to produce the reflection that the Russian nation is emerging from the long ages of Cimmerian darkness into which the repeated invasions of Asiatic hordes had plunged it, and that it is full of the energy and aspirations belonging to a people conscious of a great future in the history of mankind. _RURAL LIFE IN RUSSIA_ _LADY VERNEY_