"There were imitations of leaves, flowers, and grapes tastefully arranged together, and formed of differently colored stones; there were miniature caves and grottos in which the stones were artistically grouped; and there were busts of the Emperor of Russia and other high personages in the Empire, together with busts of the reigning sovereigns of Europe. Learning that I was an American, the proprietor of one establishment showed me a half-finished bust of President Lincoln cut in topaz and about six inches high.
"We left Ekaterineburg one evening, and about midnight passed the ridge of the Ural Mountains and entered European Russia. The Urals at this point are a succession of low hills covered with fir-trees, and as you look at the range from Ekaterineburg you would not suspect you were in the neighborhood of mountains. North and south of this point the mountains become more steep, but they nowhere attain to great heights. All this part of the Urals is rich in minerals; there are extensive mines of iron, copper, and gold, those of iron being of the greatest, and the gold-mines of the least importance.
"A very large part of all the iron used in Russia comes from the Urals, and the same is the case with the copper. The copper-money of the Empire is coined at the Moneta Fabric, or mint, at Ekaterineburg, and from an immense foundery a few miles away comes the Russian sheet-iron which is so popular in America for the manufacture of parlor stoves and stove-pipe. The Urals contain the only mines where malachite is found in quantities of any consequence, and when you look at a piece of this beautiful oxide of copper you can be almost absolutely certain that it came from the neighborhood of Ekaterineburg. A mass of malachite weighing more than four hundred tons was found there about the middle of the present century, the largest single piece ever discovered.
MONUMENT AT THE BOUNDARY.
"At the boundary between European and Asiatic Russia there is a stone monument with the word EUROPE on one side and ASIA on the other. It is only seventeen hundred feet above the level of the sea, and was erected to commemorate the visit of the Emperor Alexander I. to his Siberian dominions. I stepped from the sleigh and stood for a few moments with a foot in either continent, but though I made careful observation I could not discover any difference between the soil, climate, productions, manners, customs, or social conditions of the Occident and Orient of the Old World.
WESTERN SLOPE OF THE URAL MOUNTAINS.