Ten or fifteen miles above this village we reached Mihalofski, containing a hundred houses and three or four hundred inhabitants.  From the river this town appeared quite pretty and thriving; the houses were substantially built, and many had flower gardens in front and neat fences around them.  Between the town and the river there were market gardens in flourishing condition, bearing most of the vegetables in common use through the north.  The town is along a ridge of easy ascent, and most of the dwellings are thirty or forty feet above the river.  Its fields and gardens extend back from the river wherever the land is fertile and easiest cleared of the forest.  On the opposite side of the river there are meadows where the peasants engage in hay cutting.  The general appearance of the place was like that of an ordinary village on the lower St. Lawrence, though there were many points of difference.

In several rye fields the grain had been cut and stacked.  Near our landing was a mill, where a man, a boy, and a horse were manufacturing meal at the rate of seven poods or 280 pounds a day.  The whole machinery was on the most primitive scale.

Entering the house of the mill-owner I found the principal apartment quite neat and well arranged, its walls being whitewashed and decorated with cheap lithographs and wood-cuts.  Among the latter were several from the Illustrated London News and L’Illustration Universelle.  The sleeping room was fitted with bunks like those on steamboats, though somewhat wider.  There was very little clothing on the beds, but several sheepskin coats and coverlids were hanging on a fence in front of the house.

Borasdine had business at the telegraph station, whither I accompanied him.  The operator furnished a blank for the despatch, and when it was written and paid for he gave a receipt.  The receipt stated the hour and minute when the despatch was taken, the name of the sender, the place where sent, the number of words, and the amount paid.  This form is invariably adhered to in the Siberian telegraph service.

The telegraph on the lower Amoor was built under the supervision of Colonel Romanoff and was not completed at the time of my visit.  It commenced at Nicolayevsk and followed the south bank of the Amoor to Habarofka at the mouth of the Ousuree.  At Mariensk there was a branch to De Castries, and from Habarofka the line extended along the Ousuree and over the mountains to Posyet and Vladivostok.  From Habarofka it was to follow the north bank of the Amoor to the Shilka, to join the line from Irkutsk and St. Petersburg.  Arrangements have been made recently to lay a cable from Posyet to Hakodadi in Japan, and thence to Shanghae and other parts of China.  When the cable proposed by Major Collins is laid across the Pacific Ocean, and the break in the Amoor line is closed up, the telegraph circuit around the globe will be complete.

The telegraph is operated on the Morse system with instruments of Prussian manufacture.  Compared to our American instruments the Prussian ones are quite clumsy, though they did not appear so in the hands of the operators.  The signal key was at least four times as large as ours, and could endure any amount of rough handling.  The other machinery was on a corresponding scale.