The settlements we passed were mostly of Tartars. The women would offer for sale milk, fish, and raw turnips--the latter sweet and tasty, though hard, and very cheap. Two and three for a cent. Toward nightfall we would pass fishermen in crude boats that were often merely dugouts--logs, hollowed and roughly shaped. On the whole the civilization of these shores was as crude as any frontier country could be, and the dirty, dilapidated hamlets we could see in the distance from the steamer-decks, suggested only decay and stagnation. Even the somber wooden Moslem houses of worship with their gilded, or painted, crescents, looked faded and forgotten, rarely reflecting any of the garishness which characterizes the temples of Mohammed. Relics of a dead civilization are all that remain to these people who once boasted a powerful empire, with glory as well as power. Tobolsk proved a business-like town of something over 20,000 inhabitants. It commands an excellent location on the river Irtysh, facing the junction of the Tobol. On a high bluff to the west of the town proper is a striking monument to Jermak, the conqueror of Siberia. Behind this monument is a small but tremendously interesting museum. It contains large collections of old instruments of torture: branding tools, used to stamp the foreheads and cheeks of prisoners, instruments for pulling out the center bone of the nose, painful shackles, and other horrible devices for human torture. Besides these things are splendid collections epitomizing the ethnology of western Siberia through costumes and excellent models of the industries of the natives. The ornithology, geology, and mineralogy of the country are also indicated through complete collections. There is one good hotel in Tobolsk, but when we arrived it was entirely filled with officers and we were obliged to put up at a small and dilapidated inn kept by a Pole. The man’s father had been sent to Siberia with the Polish revolutionists of the early ’50’s. This man was born in Siberia and had never been out of the country. He had married there and had children born to him, so that he had virtually become a Siberian. One of the letters of introduction given to me in Tyumen was to a young woman whom I had been particularly told to seek out first. For reasons I did not question I was to find her through a mutual friend of hers and the writer of my letter of introduction. The morning after our arrival in Tobolsk my interpreter and I called at the house of the friend, who accepted the password we had been instructed in as evidence of our trustworthiness. She bade us enter and wait in an inner room while she sent out for the girl whom we wanted to see.