Rensselaer Union, Volume 9, Number 19, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 January 1877 — Scenes on Russian Railroads. [ARTICLE]

Scenes on Russian Railroads.

North or South there is scarcely any Ciffereuce between the aspect of a Ruemao station. For hundreds of versts you , Uirou j? h > flat or slight ®5 “adulating senes of enormous snow - •clad pisrn. Stunted birch, fir and larch ■*** ell the flora you perceive. You never set upon & town—one, I mean, with asmoke curling from the chimneys, with fr ? m the caaementa, IMren P“yt“B . W 1 lhe doorsteps, with dogs or poultry at the street ends. For strategic reasons the railway has bew made to runes straight as bn arrow from aTartar’a bowfrom one great point ’STkuffi *« dtsferential’v consulted as to tbc direction which the St. Peters*nd a ruler and struck a straight line on the map from the rtew to the old metropo-

Ils of hi* empire; and the consequence of thia inflexible militarism as applied to civil engineering is that the majority of Russian toWAs are two or three miles distant from the railway stations which bear their names. The platform and its appurtenances are isolated in the midst of a snowy waste. Round about you are gathered a few sheds' and wooden cabins, together with .vast piles of roughly-hewn logs for fuel. That is all, save the signal-boxes, which ook either like gibbets with packingcases instead of corpses suspended from them, or packing-cases without gibbets. Women are often employed in signaling, and wretchedly unwomanly they appear, bundled up in hoods and gaberdines of sheepskin reaching no lower than the knee, with their legs swathed and muffled to almost elphantine proportions in canvas bandages, cross-gartered with strings of untanned leather. These, with heavy clogs of wood, complete the costume of the anomalous creature, who mechanical ly waves a tattered black or a ragged yellow flag as the train passes, and makes us wonder whether Mother Eve could ever have realized the possibility of her daughters being put to such base uses as these. —Odessa Cor. London Telegraph.