Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 1.djvu/55

Rh all along the track, and occasionally we crossed an open glade in the heart of the forest where the grass was almost entirely hidden by a vivid sheet of yellow trollius.

We were greatly surprised to find in this wild mining region of the Urál, and on the very remotest frontier of European Russia, a railroad so well built, perfectly equipped, and luxuriously appointed as the road over which we were traveling from Perm to Ekaterínburg. The stations were the very best we had seen in Russia; the road-bed was solid and well ballasted; the rolling stock would not have suffered in comparison with that of the best lines in the empire; and the whole railroad property seemed to be in the most perfect possible order. Unusual attention had been paid evidently to the ornamentation of the grounds lying adjacent to the stations and the track. Even the verst-posts were set in neatly fitted mosaics three or four feet in diameter of colored Urál stones. The station of Nízhni Tagíl, on the Asiatic slope of the mountains, where we stopped half an hour for dinner, would have been in the highest degree creditable to the best railroad in the United States. The substantial station building, which was a hundred feet or more in length, with a covered platform twenty feet wide extending along the whole front, was tastefully painted in shades of brown and had a red sheet-iron roof. It stood in the middle of a large, artistically planned park or garden, whose smooth, velvety greensward was broken by beds of blossoming flowers and shaded by the feathery foliage of graceful white-stemmed birches; whose winding walks were bordered by neatly trimmed hedges; and whose