North and south of the head-waters of the Ingodah and Orion there are mountain ranges, having a general direction east and west.  Away to the north the Polar sea and the lakes and rivers near it supply the rain and snow-clouds.  As they sweep toward the south these clouds hourly become less and their last drops are wrung from them as they strike the slopes of the mountains and settle about their crests.  The winter clouds from the Indian Ocean and Caspian Sea rarely pass the desert of Gobi, and thus the country of the Trans-Baikal has a climate peculiar to itself.

During my stay at Chetah a party was organized to hunt gazelles.  There were ten or fifteen officers and about twenty Cossacks, as at Blagoveshchensk.  Up to the day of the excursion the weather was delightful, but it suddenly changed to a cloudy sky, a high wind, and a freezing temperature.  The scene of action was a range of hills five or six miles from town.  We went there in carriages and wagons and on horseback, and as we shivered around a fire built by the Cossacks near an open work cabin, we had little appearance of a pleasure party.

[Illustration:  ON THE HILLS NEAR CHETAH.]

The first drive resulted in the death of two rabbits and the serious disability of a third.  One halted within twenty steps of me and received the contents of my gun-barrel.  I reloaded while he lay kicking, and just as I returned the ramrod to its place the beast rose and ran into the thick bushes.  I hope he recovered and will live many years.  He seemed gifted with a strong constitution, and I heard several stories of the tenacity of life displayed by his kindred.

The rabbit or hare (lepus variabilis) abounds in the valley of the Amoor and generally throughout Siberia.  He is much larger than the New England rabbit I hunted in my boyhood, and smaller than the long-eared rabbit of the Rocky Mountains and California.  He is grey or brown in summer and white in winter, his color changing as cold weather begins.  No snow had fallen at Chetah, but the rabbits were white as chalk and easily seen if not easily killed.  The peasants think the rabbit a species of cat and refuse to eat his flesh, but the upper classes have no such scruples.  I found him excellent in a roast or stew and admirably adapted to destroying appetites.  Our day’s hunt brought us one gazelle, six rabbits, one lunch, several drinks, and one smashed wagon.

I saw at Chetah a chess board in a box ten inches square with a miniature tree six inches high on its cover.  The figure of a man in chains leaning upon a spade near a wheelbarrow, stood under the tree.  The expression of the face, the details of the clothing, the links of the chains, the limbs of the tree, and even the roughness of its bark, were carefully represented.  It was the work of a Polish exile, who was then engaged upon something more elaborate.  Chessmen, tree, barrow, chains, and all, were made from black bread!  The man took part of his daily allowance, moistened it with water, and kneaded it between his fingers till it was soft like putty.  In this condition he fashioned it to the desired shape.