If anything, the general appearance of these Siberian villages is even more dreary and depressing than that of their counterparts in European Russia, where the houses are often gaily painted. Here they are built entirely of unhewn wood, like the log-huts of the Far West. Then, the few domestic animals to be seen wandering about the roadway are not reassuring, for the dogs look like wolves, and the enormous black pigs like wild boars. Nevertheless, I am of opinion that the Siberian peasant is better off than his Russian brother. His _isbas_ are certainly more spacious, although, to be sure, six, seven, and even ten, persons are usually crowded into two or three tiny rooms, the immense stove in the centre of which, in winter, is usually used as a bedstead by the entire family, whereby whatever air otherwise might be admitted is hermetically excluded. For all that, I have never seen in Siberia any of those miserable hovels to be found in Russia, but undoubtedly the manners and customs of the Siberian peasants are even more primitive than those of the Russians. They possess less knowledge of hygiene and cleanliness, and are absolutely ignorant of everything calculated to render life in the least degree agreeable or rational. During the six winter months the Siberian keeps his house rigorously shut, excluding even a breath of air; in summer he does the same, for the double windows of the two or three very small sleeping-rooms are never opened on any pretext. These Siberian peasants are, moreover, astonishingly lazy and apathetic. Their only pleasure in life consists in dreaming away the time whilst smoking their pipes, and in drinking _vodka_, not to enliven themselves, but simply to get dead-drunk. Whilst the men are at the public-house the women stand by their open doors, listless and gossiping, indolently watching their fair-haired children, who, with only a red shirt on, fabricate the time-honoured dirt-pies of universal childhood in the mud or else roll about in the dust. Work is limited to what is absolutely indispensable, and the Siberian peasant is much happier doing nothing than in working to obtain what his fellows in other countries would consider the necessaries of life, but which he looks upon as ludicrously superfluous. Every village possesses a herd of cows, which you may watch in the early morning hours straggling off to the pastures, driven along by two or three old men or urchins, and although you can always get excellent milk, butter is very scarce, and cheese unknown. As to a garden, even for the cultivation of necessary vegetables, I have never seen one in the hundred villages I have visited, excepting, indeed, in Trans-Baikalia, where I perceived one or two attached to the _stanitsas_ belonging to some Cossacks. It is not because vegetables will not grow, but because the peasants will not cultivate them. In the towns in the Amur district, such as Blagovyeshchensk, Khabarofsk, and a few others,