The section of the Russian colony in which we have been lodging consists of five hundred-odd traders. They have drifted down from Siberia, and on the free ground of taxless Urga have established their shops of gaudy European cloths, enameled cooking-utensils, candles, and cutlery. These Russians, whose whitewashed many-paned houses fill a quarter of the town, have not the large interests watched by the English merchants, who dot the globe with their agencies. They are small Trans-Baikal shopkeepers, transplanted bodily. They build their houses in the Siberian way, and their wives toil personally at the oven. They wear blouses and felt boots as the house-dress, and keep the ikons in the corner. Prosperity is evidenced in the striking-clocks, the lamps, nickeled samovars, and curtained double windows. But they are still not many removes from the peasant. There is, however, another section of Urga’s Russian colony, grouped around the consulate, a large compound situated a verst east of the Mongol town, which was built in 1863, and was fortified in 1900, against the Boxers. Within this compound are the Orthodox Church, the Russian doctor, the rooms of the twenty Cossacks of the Guard, and the great empty barracks of the two _sotnias_ that were sent here in Boxer times, and were, to the regret of their compatriots, later removed. The barracks are still ready for any future visits, and the breastwork, with its stake and fosse lined with barbed-wire, is equal to any force which from a five-hundred-verst radius can assemble against it. In this quarter, the Russian consul is autocrat. He is the official notary, without whose stamp no contract is legal, the chief of police, the guardian of orphans. Around him revolves the society of the few dozen mondaines of Urga, whose personnel consists of the officials, the garrison officers, and some half-dozen commercial agents, single generally, or with distant families. They conduct their bachelor quarters through Chinese servants, and their cuisines are helped out by all the canned and bottled delicacies that can be ordered from the frontier. The gold-mines, and the extensive wool-trade which produces a commerce of twenty to thirty millions, demand that first-grade men watch the interests of the great companies which handle the business. So men of the best cosmopolitan Russian type come, at salaries proportioned to their sacrifice. They gather in the consulate evenings, or sit in the fenced-off boxes at the theatrical performances, which periodically come down from Kiahta. A few families who have made their sixteen-day camel-trip from Kalgan and Peking have foregathered here with their household goods and gods.