The House of the Dead

IN the midst of the steppes, of the mountains, of the impenetrable forests of the desert regions of Siberia, one meets from time to time with little towns of a thousand or two inhabitants, built entirely of wood, very ugly, with two churches-one in the centre of the town, the other in the cementery-in a word, towns which bear much more resemblance to a good-sized village in the suburbs of Moscow than to a town properly so called.