Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 1.djvu/147

Rh and a beautiful garden, with winding walks, rustic arbors, long lines of currant and raspberry bushes, and beds of flowering plants. At one end of this garden was a spacious conservatory, filled with geraniums, verbenas, hydrangeas, cactuses, orange and lemon trees, pine-apples, and all sorts of tropical and semi-tropical shrubs, and near at hand was a large hot-house full of cucumbers and ripening cantaloupes. In the middle of the garden stood a square building, sixty feet long by forty or fifty feet wide, which was composed almost entirely of glass, which had no floor except the earth, and which served, Mr. Kolmakóf said, as a sort of winter garden and a place of recreation during cold or stormy weather. In this miniature Crystal Palace stood a perfect grove of bananas and young palms, through which ran winding walks bordered by beds of flowers, with here and there amidst the greenery a comfortable lounging-place or rustic seat. The trees, flowers, and shrubs were not planted in tubs or pots, but grew directly out of the earthen floor of the greenhouse, so that the effect was almost precisely that of a semi-tropical garden enclosed in glass.

"Who would have thought," said Mr. Frost, as he threw himself into one of the rustic seats beside a bed of blossoming verbenas, "that we should come to Siberia to sit under palm-trees and in the shade of bananas?"

After a walk through the spacious wooded park which adjoined the garden, we returned to the house, and were served with a lunch or cold supper consisting of caviar, pickled mushrooms, salmon, cold boiled fowl, white bread, sweet cakes, and wild strawberries, with vódka, two or three kinds of wine, and tea.

It had grown quite dark when, about eleven o'clock, the horses that we had ordered in the neighboring village arrived, and, bidding our courteous host good-by, we climbed into the tárantás and set out for a long, dark, and dreary night's ride. The road, which had never been good, was in worse condition than usual, owing to recent and heavy rains.