LIFE on the SIBERIAN STEPPES.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XIX, Issue 6422, 17 June 1882, Page 7

LIFE on the SIBERIAN STEPPES.

The special correspondent of the New, York Herald, describing his journey from Orenburg to Omsk, says:—Besides the striking phenonema of nature there is but little to be seen during the, long ride across the plains, except in and near the miserable Russian villages that are dotted every ten or fifteen miles along the route. Just now the villages showed much more life and animation than usual; for the last weel:s before the long season of religious fasts it is the custom for the young people to get married, and the more the merrier. In a score of villages through which we passed weddings seemed to be the only occupation going on. Sledges, driven by wreath-crowned peasants, crowded to the fullest extent with girls of all ages, from six to thirty, all singing with unpleasantly high, screeching voices, pass back and forth along the village streets or are driven in procession around the little woodeti church. The older peasants, re- j latives of bride and bridegroom, atay insido and get dead drunk in honour of the occasion. In one posthouse we were caused a long delay by the old postmaster haying drunk himself silly, though only a little after noon ; .by night he would either have the delirium tremens or be found by the traveller rolling outside in the snow. Of animal life in the village streets you see on sunny days all the. cattle of the commuuity standing close up against the walls of the houses on the warm side of the street, getting all the comfort they can out of the sunbeams, the younger members here beginning that acquaintance which in spring time ripens on the steppes to love and the more earnest duties of animal existence. Of fellow-tra-vellers you meet but few at the posthouscs along the road in winter time. In these iv sting-places there is always one room set apart for travellers, where you may sleep through the night on the hard benches if you choose without any payment whatever being exacted. In our journey of a thousand miles the number of travellers we met could be counted on the fingers. At one station wo found a Russian officcr and his wife occupying two sofas of the guest room. At another we met an entire family who had sprmt six weeks on the road from Irkutsk to Troisk. The husband, a man of about fort}', had occupied a post as cashier in a bank at Irkutsk, and was going to St. Petersburg to seek a new and more genial climate. He wa • accompanied by his wife, a little child, and an old nurse. One child, a little girl, he told us, had been taken sick at Krasnojarsk, and there she had died and had been buried. At another station wc met.an old government employee, tottering and feeUe, who had spent thirty years of his life in Irkutsk, and had finally obtained influence enough to get himself temoved to St. Petersburg, where he hoped to end his life among his friends. .He was a sorrowfullooking wreck, and had had the misfortune to be robbed on his way by a fellow-tra-veller. Rarely, indeed, does a petty official ever return from his far Siberian post. It is easy enough to get sent out, but only one in a thousand can ever save monoy enough to return to their friends, v