At Bialystok, the next station, a lady left the cars and was met by a young man, perhaps her son, in military dress; they kissed each other four times, and he then kissed her hand, and the salutations were completed. Many Jewish women were out to-day, which is one of their feasts; the cross-roads were thronged with Jews, who seemed to be gathering there to see the cars passing; they were not allowed on the track or on the side of the railroad, but must keep themselves on the wagon-roads, where they crossed the track. This town of Bialystok is quite an important place of 16,000 people, on the borders of the old kingdom, and in the cutting up of the country it has sometimes been Prussia, sometimes Russia, and aforetime Poland. It is now Russia, of course. We come on to Grodno, with its 20,000 inhabitants, which is a large town in Russia proper, and we feel a pleasant relief in being within the bounds of the empire itself, though even this was once in Poland, and the residence of some of her kings. Here sat the diets, or congress, of Poland, and even that most celebrated of all of them, the diet of 1793, which gave its consent to the partition of Poland. Here, too, the last king of Poland, Stanislaus Augustus Poniatowski, laid down his sceptre. We find the Jews, in great numbers, out on a holiday; the grand-high-priest, with his gorgeous breastplate on, with long hair, as if it had never been cut and he were a Nazarene from his birth. We are now travelling in Lithuania, once a duchy, whose duke married the Queen of Poland, by name Hedwiga, in 1386. This union made Poland powerful to resist the Tartars and the Dukes of Moscow, and to maintain the independence of the kingdom for a long series of years. The union of Lithuania and Poland continued until the third partition in 1795. The country appears poorer as we advance; the soil is less fertile; there is more sandy and barren waste. Pines and firs and white birches are the trees we see now; the houses of the peasants are low and poor; we have long since ceased to see improvements about the railroad stations; we are getting into regions of less civilization. As far as the eye reaches away to the horizon, no hills are in sight. It was across these wide plains that the great French captain led his hosts to invade Russia, sixty years ago! We shall be frequently on the track of that army’s awful march, and its disastrous retreat. We have come to Kowno, where the rivers Vilia and Niemen meet. Here the French army crossed the Niemen, June 23, 1812, on their way to Moscow, and a gentle rise of ground, on the bank, is still called Napoleon’s Hill. It was a mighty host when it was here in June. All the annals of war and of the world furnish no parallel to the story of that campaign; it was an epitome of Napoleon’s whole career. But it is rare that marble is so modest as the monument which the Russians have set up at Kowno to commemorate the