Suddenly we come into a square crowded with people, gay with life and motion, and motley in colors. It fairly buzzes with talk and cries and chaffering. Low-built booths face every side of the open _piazza_. We catch a glimpse of one stocked with hardware. Opposite it stands a little shrine within which are dimly visible pictured saints and the Madonna, before which are scores of burning tapers. Our _isvoschik_ takes off his hat as he drives past, and reverently makes the sign of the cross. He crosses himself also as he passes the white church of St. Nicholas with its green roofs and gilded crosses, and he removes his cap to the long-haired and dark-robed pope that he meets, for the Siberian pays much reverence to his Church. [Illustration: THE ANGARA RIVER THE CATHEDRAL IRKUTSK] The residences improve from the log cabins of the outskirts, and grow into the two-storied whitewashed structures of the main thoroughfares. The streets also have an interesting procession of people. The big troika of some high official glides past, with coal-black horses and a coachman padded out into a liveried Santa Claus, after the style of St. Petersburg. Officers of the garrison sweep by in their light-gray overcoats. Shoals of sleighs and sledges are going to and fro. At almost every corner, armed with a sabre and revolver, stands a police officer. As one drives along he reads the Russian letters on the placards and the names on the stores. Many here are Hebrew, for the Siberians of the cities are more tolerant than their European cousins. Irkutsk has a very large and prosperous Jewish merchant community, and sent her Dr. Mendelberg to the Duma. Irkutsk has had its representation cut down, they say, _post hoc_,--perhaps _propter hoc_. The driver, who has kept his horses at a moderate trot from the station through the town, suddenly cries out to them, and swings and snaps his lash till they break into a gallop. “We always come in handsomely,” says the city native who is with you, as the sleigh pulls up triumphantly at the door of the Hôtel Métropole. A swarm of attendants greet you at the portal, a tall uniformed concierge, half a dozen aproned porters, a waiter or two, a page, and behind them the Hebraic Hazan, our host. Each porter seizes a parcel and the concierge leaves his post by the front door to lead the procession up the broad red-carpeted stairway. With a rattle of keys he swings open the door to a salon big enough to give a ball in, and whose ceiling is six good feet above one’s head. The average New York flat would rattle around in it. The concierge advances to its centre and bows. Then he goes on through to another room, almost its duplicate in size, with a forlorn-looking washstand and a screen across one corner. “But the bedroom, where do we sleep?” you ask. “_Sdiece, gaspadine_,” he says, “right here”; and he conducts you to the screen.