Mr. Bezkrovoff, a Russian engineer, is in this country. He said to a reporter recently: “Our government ordered me to study your ways and means of transportation. We have a costly system of canals uniting our seas, the Baltic, the White, the Caspian, and the Black; we have many great navigable rivers, and, besides, we have built tens of thousands of versts of railroads, and yet transportation in our country is in its infancy. Thousands of tons of grain rot annually at our railroad stations, for there are no stores. In the southern part of Russia there is abundance of fish, meat, vegetables, and other provisions, and yet in the northern part of the country the people can not afford to buy those provisions, for the cost of transportation puts it beyond their means. We have plenty of coal and kerosene, but at St. Petersburg, and even at Moscow, the English coal and the American kerosene are cheaper than the Russian. Our canals and railroads don’t pay to the government the cost of keeping.” * * * * * There are very few who have not been puzzled how to pronounce some out-of-the-way word which has suddenly sprung into common use. A bewildered reader writes to a Boston paper saying that the pronunciation of Whittier’s “Maud Muller” has long been such a puzzle to him. “When I was a little fellow,” he says, “I pronounced it phonetically, of course, Mul-ler. Well, shortly after I heard a literary gentleman—a judge, too—read the poem at an evening gathering, and I noticed particularly he pronounced it Mü-ler. I made a note of it and carried that pronunciation with confidence for a long time, until one day in High School the teacher informed us that the proper pronunciation of that name was ‘Mwë-ler.’ So I changed my colors again and sailed under Mwëler for quite a while, until one day I got into conversation with a young physician, a good German student. ‘Oh, yes,’ said he, ‘I can tell you how to pronounce that name! Whenever you see a German word with two dots over the letter u, it is always pronounced as if immediately followed by an r, thus: ‘Murl-er, Maud Murler.’ By this time I had lost all confidence in everyone and decided to let the young lady severely alone, but the other day I happened to run across a German fresh from the old country, and I said: ‘Do you have any people over in your land called Muller? M-u-l-l-e-r!’ ‘Oh, yes, plenty.’ ‘Well, what do you call them—how do you pronounce it?’ ‘Miller,’ said he. ‘It’s a very common name—Miller.’ I thanked him and left, and now if there is another way in which that word can be pronounced I should like to hear it. I am honestly seeking for information.” * * * * *