Move further toward the frontier towns, where the relayed horses bring the weekly mail,--you have gone back a hundred and fifty years. You are among our own ancestors of the days of the Stamp Act. Did the General Howe who governs the oblast from his Irkutsk residency overhear the school-boys of Troitzkosavsk as they chant the forbidden _Marseillaise_, he, too, might say that freedom was in the air. These Siberian frontiersmen shoot the deer with their permitted flint-locks as straight as the neighbors of Israel Putnam, and with spear and gun they face the bear that the dusky Buriat hunters have tracked to its lair. Our Puritans are there, rugged, red-bearded dissenters, “Stare’ Obriachi,” Old Believers, they are called, who came to Siberia rather than use Bishop Nikon’s amended books of prayer. Yankee-like, outspoken, keen at a trade, are these big Siberian sons of men who dared greatly in their long frozen march. The grants to Lord Baltimores and Padroon Van Rensselaers are in the vast “cabinetski” estates of the grand-ducal circle, engulfing domains great as European kingdoms. Go into one of the villages of the peasants transplanted in a body by the paternal Government. Here are the patient, enduring recruits for the army, brothers to the toilers over whose fields the Grand Monarch’s wars rolled back and forth. Though steeped in ignorance and overwhelmed by the incubus of communism, they are capable of real and splendid manhood, and will show it when their world has struggled through into the century in which we others live. Go to a mining-camp in the Chickoya Valley. It is California and the days of ’49. Histories as romantic as those of the Sierras are being lived out in its unsung gorges,--tales of hardships, of grub-stakes, of bonanzas in Last Chance Gulches. When the bumping tarantass rolls across the Chinese frontier into Mongolia, it enters a kingdom of the Middle Ages flung down into the twentieth century. Feudal princes, lords of armies weaponed with spear and bow, tax and drive to the corvée their nomad serfs. A hierarchy of priests whose divine head lives in a palace at Holy Urga, sways the multitude of superstition-steeped Mongols, and receives the homage of pilgrims wending their way from Siberia, from the Volga, from Tibet, from all Mongolia, to their Canterbury of Lamaism. In prostrate devotion the penitents girdle the Sacred City before whose hovels beggars dispute with dogs their common nourishment, and in whose compounds princes of the race of Genghis Khan, with armies of retainers, live bedless, bathless, lightless, in the felt huts of their race. Squalid magnificence and good-humored kindly hospitality are linked to utter brutality. Sable-furs and silks cover sheepskins worn until they drop from the body. Here and there among the natives a Chinese trading caravansary, alien, walled, peculiar, stands as of old the Hansa-town, with merchant guilds and far-brought caravan goods.