The first American highway to the Western Reserve was superseded by the better avenue of the newly built Erie Canal, yet came to its own again beneath the tracks of the Baltimore and Ohio. So, far to the westward of Japan’s outpost, the age-old caravan road, with a shadowy fantastic history dim as its dun trail across the desert, may rise to a resurrected glory as a new road to China. Its greatness is of yesterday and of to-morrow. Unto to-day belongs the quaintness of the cavalcade that passes to and fro along its track. Over the frozen snows of winter and the rocky trails of summer there plod horse and ox and camel, sleigh and wagon and cart,--a broken line of men and beasts. Russian posts thunder past with galloping horses, three abreast. Bands of Cossacks convoy the guarded camel-trains of heavy mail for China. One meets troops of boyish recruits, singing lustily in chorus on the tramp northward, and Mongol carts and flat-featured Buriats on their little shaggy ponies, sleepy wooden villages, forests, steppes, swamps, frozen river-courses, mountain passes. Through the kaleidoscope of races and peoples one moves in a world-forgotten life, a procession of the ages. [Illustration: CHURCH OF ST. BASIL, MOSCOW (Ivan the Terrible blinded its architect that he might never duplicate the masterpiece)] On the threshold of Siberia the traveler has turned back in manner, in ways of thought, in government, in everything, to the past. Go into one of these cities,--you are in the Germany of 1849, with the embers still hot of the fire lighted by the republican movement of the young men and the industrials. The seeming chance of victory has passed them by. The iron hand is over all. One hears of Siberian Carl Schurzes, fugitives to America and to Switzerland, of the month-lived Chita Republic, of the row of gallows at Verhneudinsk, of the bloody assizes at Krasnoyarsk. It is as if one lived when citizens gathered in excited groups in the Forum to discuss the news from Philippi; or as if, from the broken masonry of the Tuileries, there stepped out into breathing actuality the five hundred Marseillaises “who know how to die,” fronting the red Swiss before the palace of Louis, the King. Here is the reality of friends in hiding, of files of soldiers at each railway-station, of police-examined passports without which one cannot sleep a night in town, of arms forbidden, meetings forbidden, books forbidden,--all things forbidden. Here as there men thought that the new could come only by revolution. Yet one can see, despite all, the germs of improvement and the upward pressures of evolution.