Many-faceted is the life in a Siberian city. In numerous ways it seems feverish and abnormal, for it represents the young blood of a capable race struggling upward, and knowing that in much its battle is desperate. The towns have hardly yet got settled methods; they are outgrown villages where men of all stamps, who have become enriched in the new land, come for the pleasures or the benefit of a less monotonous existence. The traditions of peasant origins survive in the conditions and general civic neglect. Irkutsk, once its novelties have become familiar, has lost its charm. That it is provincial is no discredit, but its amusements are of the grosser order, unredeemed by wit. Every evening the tawdry dining-room at the hotel echoes the songs and noise of the revelers. The same circle attends the theatres. The students discuss hotly the rights of man and the Valhalla prepared for all martyrs, and calm simple wholesome life seems to be reserved for the workaday world which moves on its slow toilsome upward way in silence. There is, however, to-night an unwonted stir at the Hôtel Métropole. The corridors are thronged. A Russian friend points out the notables. The blue-uniformed official yonder with the gray mustache and the row of glittering orders on his breast is the Governor-General. Half a dozen members of the local bar, in frock-coats, pass through. In the dining-room a young lieutenant, dashingly clad in long maroon coat with the row of silver-topped cartouches and the clattering sabre of the Emperor’s Cossack Guard, is being deferentially entertained by officers of the garrison. Three officials are taking champagne with two beautifully gowned women, Parisiennes even to their long pendant earrings. The hotel-pages in fresh red blouses and high boots pass here and there with messages. The waiters, with intensified deference, glide among the crowd in its many-colored uniforms and glittering war-medals. “Who has arrived?” we ask, surveying the scene. “A member of the Imperial Cabinet.” The announcement of his name has a personal interest and memories of earlier stays in Russia. The Minister’s life has been a romance indeed. Disagreeing with his family through liberal ideas, he went in 1862 to Birkenhead as a locomotive engineer, to the United States, to Argentine, and returning to Russia worked up from a very small government position to be chief of all the Russian roads, railways, and telegraphs, and Minister of Ways and Communications in the Czar’s Cabinet. His brain threw the line of rails over half a continent. On the outbreak of the Japanese War he was called from his retirement to the colossal task of bringing to the front across the width of Asia half a million men, their artillery and arms, their food, their transport, all on the one line of rails. He has served under three Emperors and is life-member of the Senate.