There are many Tartars living on the steppe, but we saw very little of them, as our changes were made at the Russian villages.  Before the reign of Catherine II. there was but a small population between Tumen and Tomsk, and the road was more a fiction than a fact.  The Governor General of Siberia persuaded Catherine to let him have all conscripts of one levy instead of sending them to the army.  He settled them in villages along the route over the steppe, and the wisdom of his policy was very soon apparent.  The present population is made up of the descendants of these and other early settlers, together with exiles and voluntary emigrants of the present century.  Several villages have a bad reputation, and I heard stories of robbery and murder.  In general the dwellers on the steppe are reputable, and they certainly impressed me favorably.

I was told by a Russian that Catherine once thought of giving the Siberians a constitution somewhat like that of the United States of America, but was dissuaded from so doing by one of her ministers.

[Illustration:  WOMEN SPINNING.]

The villages were generally built each in a single street, or at most, in two streets.  The largest houses had yards, or enclosures, into which we drove when stopping for breakfast or dinner.  The best windows were of glass or talc, fixed in frames, and generally made double.  The poorer peasants contented themselves with windows of ox or cow stomachs, scraped thin and stretched in drying.  There were no iron stoves In any house I visited, the Russian peitcha or brick stove being universal.  Very often we found the women and girls engaged in spinning.  No wheel is used for this purpose, the entire apparatus being a hand spindle and a piece of board.  The flax is fastened on an upright board, and the fingers of the left hand gather the fibres and begin the formation of a thread.  The right hand twirls the spindle, and by skillful manipulation a good thread is formed with considerable rapidity.

A great deal of hemp and flax is raised upon the steppe, and we found rope abundant, cheap, and good.  I bought ten fathoms of half-inch rope for forty copecks, a peasant bringing it to a house where we breakfasted.  When I paid for it the mistress of the house quietly appropriated ten copecks, remarking that the rope maker owed her that amount.  She talked louder and more continuously than any other woman I met in Siberia, and awakened my wonder by going barefooted into an open shed and remaining there several minutes.  She stood in snow and on ice, but appeared quite unconcerned.  Our thermometer at the time showed a temperature of 21 deg. below zero.

The only city on the steppe is Omsk, at the junction of the Om and Irtish, and the capital of Western Siberia.  It is said to contain twelve thousand inhabitants, and its buildings are generally well constructed.  We did not follow the post route through Omsk, but took a cut-off that carried us to the northward and saved a hundred versts of sleigh riding.  The city was founded in order to have a capital in the vicinity of the Kirghese frontier, but since its construction the frontier line has removed far away.