The train leaves the station, which is at a distance from the town, and once more we are en route. The eye rests gratefully upon the ribbon of cultivated fields which follow the Irtish down. But we reënter the steppe, and again the desolation settles over all. In hours of looking, not a habitation is seen, not an animal, not a tree,--only the same white billows. This Barbara district in the Tomsk Government has an area of fifty thousand square miles. Kainsk, some seven hundred versts from Chelliabinsk, is the centre. The section, though covered with the fertile black earth of the adjoining regions, is, owing to lack of drainage and adequate rainfall, arid and almost untilled. The round-faced civilian from the compartment further up, whose familiarity with the country has made him a welcome accession, joins us at the window. He looks out over the level plain of the Barbara Steppe with manifest satisfaction. “You admire the landscape?” we ask satirically. He smiles. “We got big money when the line went through here. I made my first fortune then.” He sighs at the memory of old times, and tells of the railway-building days when the Czar had given the order for a road across the continent, and the soldiers of fortune, of whom he was one, had gathered to the task. “Not a kopeck had I when the Dreyfus brothers made their big speculation in Argentine wheat and went down, leaving us young clerks stranded in Kiev. You know Kiev? Great pilgrimages come there to see the bodies of Joseph and his brethren, all preserved just as when they died. We heard by accident of a grading job under a big contractor out here. None of us knew anything about construction, but three of us grain-clerks wrote a letter saying we would put the work through, and started. We had just enough money to get to Samara. In Samara was a merchant much esteemed, whom I went to see. He went on our bond, never having seen us before, and gave us enough money to come. So it was in the old days. The country was flat as a board. We had but to lay down the ties and spike the rails. Thirty versts we made of this line. It cost us thirty thousand roubles a verst, but we got fifty thousand. Would that we might do that now again.” The contractor, his round jolly face glowing with the recital and his eyes shining through gold-rimmed glasses, is entertaining a growing company, for the judge has stopped to gossip, and the railroad official. “I took my money and bought an estate in the country of the Don Cossacks,” the contractor is saying. “I paid ten per cent to the Government for taxes when I bought the land. I had to pay no more taxes then all my life, but my heir would pay taxes, or, if I sold, he who bought would pay. So it was done in the Hataman Government.” “It is just,” says the judge. “Why should they, who get the property, not pay taxes?”