nt Greek, all of which are fine specimens of Russian architecture.
Among its institutions are an observatory, a museum containing an embryo
collection of Turkestan products and antiquities, and a medical dispensary
for the natives, where vaccination is performed by graduates of medicine
in the Tashkend school. The rather extensive library was originally
collected for the chancellery of the governor-general, and contains the
best collection of works on central Asia that is to be found in the world,
including in its scope not only books and pamphlets, but even magazines
and newspaper articles. For amusements, the city has a theater, a small
imitation of the opera-house at Paris; and the Military Club, which, with
its billiards and gambling, and weekly reunions, balls, and concerts,
though a regular feature of a Russian garrison town, is especially
pretentious in Tashkend. In size, architecture, and appointments, the
club-house has no equal, we were told, outside the capital and Moscow.

[Illustration: PALACE OF THE CZAR'S NEPHEW, TASHKEND.]

Tashkend has long been known as a refuge for damaged reputations and
shattered fortunes, or "the official purgatory following upon the
emperor's displeasure." One of the finest houses of the city is occupied
by the Grand Duke Nicholai Constantinovitch Romanoff, son of the late
general admiral of the Russian navy, and first cousin to the Czar, who
seems to be cheerfully resigned to his life in exile. Most of his time is
occupied with the business of his silk-factory on the outskirts of
Tashkend, and at his farm near Hodjent, which a certain firm in Chicago,
at the time of our sojourn, was stocking with irrigating machinery. All of
his bills are paid with checks drawn on his St. Petersburg trustees. His
private life is rather unconventional and even democratic. Visitors to his
household are particularly impressed with the beauty of his wife and the
size of his liquor glasses. The example of the grand duke illustrates the
sentiment in favor of industrial pursuits which is growing among the
military classes, and even among the nobility, of Russia. The government
itself, thanks to the severe lesson of the Crimean war, has learned that a
great nation must stand upon a foundation of something more than
aristocracy and nobility. To this influence is largely due the present
growing prosperity of Tashkend, which, in military importance, is rapidly
giving way to Askabad, "the key to Herat."