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88 he occupied himself in studying the geography of Russia, tracing his intended route with the finger. When in St. Petersburg he carefully concerted his plans, and spent some time in examining the city, which he describes with considerable minuteness, even giving an account of the structure and action of machinery in the large manufactories of that city. After spending the winter in St. Petersburg, he travelled by posts to, Moscow, which city he describes with the same spirit. It was not, however, until he quitted Moscow that the real difficulties of his journey began. "My situation," he says, "was now one of extreme novelty, and my feelings corresponded with its peculiarity. I was engaged under circumstances of unusual occurrence, in a solitary journey of several thousand miles, through a country perhaps the wildest on the face of the earth, and whose inhabitants were scarcely yet accounted within the pale of civilization, with no other attendant than a rude Tartar postilion, to whose language my ear was wholly unaccustomed; and yet I was supported by a feeling of happy confidence, with a calm resignation to all the inconveniences and risks of my arduous undertaking." Holman met with many adventures and suffered much hardship during his journey through Siberia, but in inhabited places he met with a great deal of hospitality and kindness. It was in the end of the year 1824, two years and a half after his departure in the little schooner from the London Docks, that he found himself at Irkutsk, in Asiatic Russia, the chief town of the government of that name, nearly four thousand miles east of St. Petersburg. He was now within a short distance of the Chinese frontier, and his ardent