The forests of birch and pine and fir, and the hills, as the car drives eastward, close in again. The crests of mid-Siberian mountains lift their snowy heads, and the train climbs up and up toward the great central Lake Baikal, and the city of Irkutsk, 3378 miles from Moscow, and further east than Mandalay. When, on this seventh day, the train is winding up the Angara Valley toward Irkutsk, one may mentally look back over the country that has been traversed and estimate somewhat the meaning of the railway. The Urals formed the first landmark. As in the dominion of the blind the one-eyed man is king, so after the monotony of the plains, the Ural Mountains seem great and worthy of the name given by the old Muscovite geographer, the “Girdle of the World.” By actual measurements, however, in their seventeen hundred miles of length, no peak rises over six thousand feet. Coming eastward from the Urals the line has cut through the southwestern corner of the old Tobolsk Government, has skirted the northern border of the steppe, has bisected the Tomsk Province, and after crossing the Yenesei River in Yeneseik has entered Irkutsk Province, and traversed the central highland region nearly to Lake Baikal. Many who journey this way will have as their first impression, when the long winter ride draws to its close, a feeling of depression, almost of discouragement, so few are the settlements, so desolate seems all Nature. They see the single line of rails, without a branch or feeder in the mighty expanse from Chelliabinsk to Irkutsk, save for the stub put in for the ungenerous outlanders of unlucky Tomsk. They calculate that for a territory forty times the size of the British Isles, and one and a half times as large as all Europe, the inadequacy of a railroad less in total mileage than the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul, is manifest. Statistically-informed bankers sometimes shrug their shoulders at the mention of the Trans-Siberian. “Every year a deficit,” they say. “Gross earnings but twenty-four million roubles,--one sixth of the Canadian Pacific Railway; one tenth of the Southern Railway. _Hudoo_ (bad)!” One hears expressed not infrequently in Russia the opinion that the railway is a sacrifice justified politically by Russia’s need for a link to the Pacific, but ineffectual to secure prosperity and advancement to the isolated land of mid-Siberia. It is deemed, like the Pyramids, a monument to colossal effort and achievement but of little service to mankind.