“We have, too, another jest, of the Tomsk Czar,” chimes in the judge. “There appeared one day there a stranger calling himself Theodore Kuzmilch, who bought a little house which he never left save to do some act of charity. For years he lived; then, when he died, the house was turned into a chapel because of his good deeds. Many years after his death, a merchant started the tale that this was the Czar Alexander I, who did not die in the Crimea, but left a false body to be carried to Petersburg and entombed in state. He had, it was told, not really died, and, disappointed at his powerlessness to help his people, had come, self-exiled, to Siberia. But we others laugh at this tale of Tomsk as an imperial residence.” The twenty minutes’ stop at Taiga ends, and the train renews its journey through the forests. With rolling hill and long-stretching forests, the watershed bounding the eastern limits of the Obi Basin is crossed near Achinsk, and the drainage-basin of the mighty Yenesei River, one million three hundred and eighty thousand square miles in area, is entered. It just fails to equal in length the Mississippi-Missouri System. Including the administrative territory “Yeneseik” of the East Siberian Gobernia, the river sweeps from the Chinese borderland north beyond the Arctic Circle. In the far south, where it rises among the Minusink Mountains, the valley country is like the Italian Alps, mild and very fertile. Iron-mines of prehistoric antiquity are found in these valleys, relics of the old Han Dynasty of China. Of the twenty million bushels of grain produced throughout the Yeneseik territory, nearly a third comes from the Minusink oasis. The railroad pierces the central plains, farmed in the most favorable spots only, and capable of enormously extended cultivation. Through alternating forest, field, and plain the train moves on, and crossing the three thousand-foot Yenesei bridge, enters the city of Krasnoyarsk. When we pull out, the engineer, who has been chatting with the erstwhile contractor, observes, “This town was a main hotbed of the great strike. They are well in hand now, but we had our time with them in 1905. Even I knew nothing of what had been prepared.” He goes on to tell the most curious tale of the organized strike movement which introduced the disturbances subsequent to the Russo-Japanese War.