At 3 p.m. we arrived at Poloviné station, simultaneously with a number of other travellers from various quarters. The long interruption of travelling from the flooding of the country, had accumulated a great many on the west of Baikal lake, and now they crowded on all at once. Amongst our fellow-travellers were several government officers, and two loquacious Poles from Irkutsk. The station could not furnish horses for half of the number, and as we had all arrived together, it was a question who should get them. We required seven for our two carriages in the then state of the roads, and it was no small satisfaction to us to find that the postmaster assigned to us the precedence. The government officers made no remark, but simply ordered the samovar to make tea. The Russian travellers also took it very quietly. But the two Poles were not so easily appeased. We could glean a few words from the volleys of abuse with which they indulged themselves, the gist of which was anathemas on the Russian government, the postal system, and things in general, winding up with a threat to set up a "republic" in Siberia. Leaving our exasperated friends to digest the venom of their spleen, we rattled away over good roads along the left bank of the Selenga, till we arrived at dusk at the post station of Ilyensk, six versts short of the town of that name. The postmaster here was an old sergeant who kept house with his aged wife. She seemed to be a good sort of woman, for the house was in capital order, the wooden floor clean scrubbed, and the walls beautifully white. Tables and chairs were in the like good trim, as were also the pots and pans and crockery. The sergeant received us with open arms, and was obsequiously civil. It is probable that the yemschiks who had conducted us from Poloviné had passed the word to him of our being distinguished personages, whom all good postmasters delighted to honour. When the little man had acquitted himself of his bowing and scraping, he began to expatiate on the coldness of the night and the badness of the road that lay before us. The end of it was that he pressed us, with his most winning grimaces, to make ourselves comfortable under his roof for the night, and proceed at daylight next morning towards the Baikal. We were but too willing to listen to the voice of the charmer, for experience had taught us that night travelling in Siberia is no great luxury. Having therefore satisfied ourselves that we should be in good time to catch the steamer on the Baikal, which makes two trips a week, we resigned ourselves with a good conscience to the kind solicitations of our host. When supper was over and bedtime came, visions of Russian vermin began to haunt us, and seriously disturbed our prospects of rest. The most careful scrutiny of the apartment, however, led to no discoveries of a disagreeable nature, beyond the shoals of small cockroaches which the heat of the room brought out in high condition. These animals