“Truly, truly, but why go so fast? It costs more for fuel, and the track has to be made straight. What good does it do you to come in sooner? If a man is in a hurry to get somewhere, can he not take an earlier train?” The group mulls over this knotty point of logic, which is complicated by the fact that our own train is twelve hours late. They cite hypothetical men with varying sorts of engagements, and then lightly switch to talk of the nourishing properties of beer, the utility of agricultural machinery, and the old tiger battue of Vladivostok. The birch groves become more frequent now, pines begin to appear, and at last the country has become forested. Several of the passengers bestir themselves for departure, gathering multitudinous bundles, and making the circuit in demonstrative hand-shaking farewells. “We come to Taiga, whence they go to the stingy town of Tomsk,” the government engineer observes. “Why do you call it the stingy town of Tomsk?” “I will tell you. Tomsk, before the railroad came, was the biggest, finest, and wealthiest of our cities. She was the capital of the great Tomsk Gobernia, with three hundred and thirty thousand square miles of area, and a million and a half people. The Tom brought the big river steamers to her wharves. In the city she had sixty thousand inhabitants, increasing every year; a university, Stroganov’s Library, a cathedral, fine public buildings. The merchants were rich; the miners came down from the Altai; all things were prospering. When the railway was ordered, the engineers came through to locate the line. All they asked was a hundred thousand roubles. But how stingy were the people of Tomsk! They had given two million roubles for their university, where the students made speeches and got sent to the Yakutski Oblast, yet they would not give a hundred thousand roubles to the engineers. ‘Give fifty, give even forty thousand,’ said the engineers. But the people of Tomsk said, ‘Are we not the seat of government for all western Siberia? Have we not Yermak’s banner in the cathedral? Are we not Tomsk? You must bring the railway here anyway.’ But if the engineers had done that, who could say where it would have ended? All the other cities would begin to make excuses. So the grades to Tomsk became suddenly so bad that the line had to be run away south here, eighty-two versts. The station where one changes was named, in mockery, Taiga, ‘in the woods.’ The merchants flocked out begging the engineers to come back to Tomsk. They offered all that had been asked and much more. They hung around the office and wept over the blue-prints. But how can a professional man change his plans and sacrifice his reputation? One cannot do such things. So Tomsk was left, and her trade now falls far behind that of the other cities, Omsk and Irkutsk. We in Siberia smile at her and call her the stingy city of Tomsk.”