is obliged to support the style of a sovereign, who resides in a palace, the corridors of which are crowded with gorgeous figures in scarlet and gold liveries, who drives out accompanied by a brilliant escort, and whose levées are as rigid in their etiquette as those of Buckingham Palace or St. James'. Behind the Government House at Tashkent extends a beautiful garden, in which a military band plays, and to which the public are admitted three times a week. It contains shaded walks and sylvan retreats, a respectable cascade formed by an artificial dam, and a pit for bears, which was kept filled by Tchernaieff, who had a craze for animals, until one of his pets nearly bit off the leg of a Kirghiz. In addition to this town residence, the Governor-General has a summer villa in the suburbs, corresponding to the Indian Viceroy's country house at Barrackpore.

buildings

In the neighbourhood of Government House are Public the principal public buildings of the city, for the most part of an exceedingly plain and unpretentious character. A new cathedral had just been completed, and the detached bell-tower was about to receive its noisy inmate. The Russians seem to have a passion for bells, perhaps derived from the ownership of the biggest bell in the world at Moscow. The form of the buildings is that with which Russia had already made me familiar-a low squat dome surmounting the centre with half domes abutting upon its sides. It contains a somewhat gaudy iconostasis, or altar screen, painted partly by amateur, partly by native talent. When I visited it, the choir, composed

entirely of soldiers, was practising; no uncommon spectacle on Russian soil, the Russians being preeminently a singing people, singing at work and singing at play, and carrying with them into the steppes of Asia the songs and staves and choruses of Europe. The older and now disused cathedral stands a short distance away. In a public garden

near the road are situated the grave and monument of Kaufmann, the first Governor-General of Turkestan and founder of Russian Tashkent, and a man possessing certain, though limited, attributes of greatness. The most pretentious building in the Russian town is undoubtedly the Club House, upon which the most unnecessary amount of money was said originally to have been spent, and which contains an enormous

circular ball-room, where dances are held on Sunday nights, and which would, I should think, accommodate quite double the dancing population of Tashkent. These military clubs, with their billiards and gambling and their weekly réunions and balls, are a regular feature of Russian life in every town where

troops are stationed; they combine the advantages of an officers' mess with those of an English club and of a casino in a foreign town. Of the other buildings the principal are an observatory, a large military hospital, a theatre, and a museum of Central Asian antiquities, flora, fauna, and products, a collection which is still in its infancy, and stands in urgent

need both of scientific arrangement and of funds.' It contains a number of prehistoric objects, found in the steppes, of old bronzes dug up at Samarkand and elsewhere, of specimen tiles from vanished mosques, and of stuffed birds and animals. Among other objects I saw a poor specimen of an ovis poli, and a preserved reshta, the horrible worm which is absorbed into the human system by drinking the water of the Zerafshan at Bokhara and elsewhere, and which I have already described in my last chapter. It resembled a thread of vermicelli, being a light yellow in colour, and when uncoiled must have been nearly a yard long. Attached to the museum at Tashkent is a library originally amassed for the Chancellery of the Governor-General, and containing the best collection of works on Central Asia published since the year 1867 that is to be found in the world. Not only books and pamphlets, but even magazine and newspaper articles, are admitted to this collection, in which I am driven to think that these humble pages may some day repose. This library is supported by a small subsidy from the state. It has been catalogued and arranged in chronological order by Mr. V. L. Mejoff, who continues to publish at St. Petersburg a series of volumes entitled 'Recueil du Turkestan,' in which every addition appears duly chronicled, and which is already the most complete bibliography of the Central Asian Question in existence.

1 M. Séménoff says that this museum ought to have been located at Samarkand, as offering a wider field for archæological investigation, and as being less subject to earthquakes than Tashkent.