example the Caspian railway, undertaken by General Annenkoff. This
general completes fifteen hundred miles of railway in the incredibly
short space of time of a year and a half, and almost before the
public is aware of its having been commenced, he is back again in
St. Petersburg dancing at a Court ball in a quadrille opposite the
Empress. The railway made by him runs at present from the Caspian
Sea to the Amou-Daria River, and will be continued to Bokhara,
Samarkand, and Tashkend, in a northerly direction, while on the
south it is to enter Persia. Should European complications, by
removing the risk of foreign interposition, make it possible for
a Russian army to reach the Caspian by way of the Black Sea and
the Caucasus, this railway gives it the desired approach to India.
By attacking us in India, which they possibly do not desire to
conquer, the Panslavists and Russian enthusiasts believe they would
establish their empire at Constantinople, and unite the whole Sclav
race under the dominion of the Tsar.

The one preponderating impression produced by a short visit to
Russia is an almost bewildering sense of its vastness, with an
equally bewildering feeling of astonishment at the centralization
of all government in the hands of the Emperor. This impression is
perhaps increased by the nature of the town of St. Petersburg. Long,
broad streets, lit at night by the electric light, huge buildings,
public and private, large and almost deserted places or squares, all
tend to produce the reflection that the Russian nation is emerging
from the long ages of Cimmerian darkness into which the repeated
invasions of Asiatic hordes had plunged it, and that it is full
of the energy and aspirations belonging to a people conscious of
a great future in the history of mankind.

_RURAL LIFE IN RUSSIA_

_LADY VERNEY_

The amount of territory given up to the serfs by the Emancipation
Act of 1861 was about one-half of the arable land of the whole
empire, so that the experiment of cutting up the large properties
of a country, and the formation instead of a landed peasantry,
has now been tried on a sufficiently large scale for a quarter of
a century to enable the world to judge of its success or failure.
There is no doubt of the philanthropic intentions of Alexander
the First, but he seems to have also aimed (like Richelieu) at
diminishing the power of the nobles, which formed some bulwark
between the absolute sway of the Crown and