proves that we are still in Europe; and away we go again. Half-way through the second stage our road ends suddenly in a broad, sluggish river, without either bridge or ford; but the traditional raft is at hand, propelled by four bearded tatterdemalions in sheepskin, with the genuine rusty tan of the desert upon their flat heavy faces. For nearly an hour we glide slowly through a labyrinth of drowned thickets, and long low mud banks, and dainty little green islets-our boatmen keeping time with a low, dirge-like chant to the plash of their oars in the thick greasy water.

And then ashore again, and on, hour after hour, through the unchanging routine of genuine Russian post travelling. From the lonely monotony of the steppe you burst at once into a populous village, with its tall painted spire, and rough-hewn log-huts, and wide, dusty streets, up and down which you rattle till you reach the little station-house with its striped posts, and little black board marked with the distances to the last and the next station. You jump out, shaking off the hay upon which you have been lying, and give your travelling-pass (podorojnaya)* to the big yellow-haired postmaster in his sheepskin frock; and he shouts for fresh horses, and asks whether you won't have a tea-urn heated, and hints at possible fresh eggs if you care to buy any. Your old driver goes off to exhibit his pourboire to his cronies of the stable; and your new driver comes shambling up, struggling into

*This is quite distinct from the passport, being merely a kind of official voucher, required to get post-horses.

his tattered frock; and the sallow low-browed villagers crowd round to stare at you, as a kind of event in their stagnant existence; and the postmaster's children clamber about your knees, and hold up their little brown faces to be petted. And presently the horses are put to, and off you go, to repeat the same programme-steppe, village, changing of horses—ad infinitum.

Once in the twenty-four hours, perhaps, you decide upon a longer halt, and spend an hour or so in drinking tumbler after tumbler of weak tea, rammed home by half a dozen gritty lumps of black bread, which serve for breakfast, dinner, supper, and everything else. As to rest, it is wonderful how soon you get used to sleeping soundly even when jolting over these tremendous ruts, with your head literally hammering whatever may be underneath it—and to being disturbed every two hours or so all night long, on arriving at a new station.

With regard to the stations themselves, one may say with Donald M'Pherson, "The more said, the less the better!" Bouzoulouk, the only considerable place on the line of march (containing 15,000 inhabitants) is merely an overgrown village under slightly improved conditions; and the villages themselves are what all Russian villages have been from time immemorial. It is not too much to assert that the same description would apply fairly enough to every ordinary cottage which I have seen from the Niemen to the Ural. Along one whole side of the interior stretches an

enormous bed, which, with its patchwork quilt, looks very much like a coloured map of the world on Mercator's projection. Fully half of another side is occupied by the huge tiled stove, on the top of which the head of the family stretches himself whenever he wishes to get warm at short notice. In the farther corner, with a tiny oil-lamp burning before it, hangs the portrait of the patron saint, around whose staring gilt frame you may at times observe a pious cockroach making a laborious pilgrimage.

Beside the little window usually stand a crazy deal table and two or three rough stools, with the addition (if the host be a man well to do) of a huge iron-clamped chest, painted bright vermilion in accordance with that childish love of gay colours characteristic of the Moujik, whose very word for "admirable" means literally "bright red." The window-sill itself is tenanted by the corpulent samovar (tea urn) which ought to be the national blazon of Russia, with the motto, "In tea speravi." The blackened rafters stand out like the ribs of a whale, enlivened by the gambols of numerous spider-Blondins on tight-ropes of their own plaiting-while every now and then one of the troupe loses his hold and falls with a loud splash into your tumbler. The walls are of plank, cemented with clay and dried leaves; the floor is merely trodden earth, larded with crushed beetles and furrowed by the excavations of inquiring poultry; and the whole building, with its rough-hewn timbers and its miscellaneous crew of men and animals, might

pass for Noah's first attempt at an ark, overcrowded by a false alarm of the Deluge.

My journey is for the most part uneventful enough; but one incident of it is not easily forgotten. A little way beyond Bouzoulouk, I come out, towards ten in the morning, upon a vast green plain, whose unbroken level looks doubly desolate after the endless ridges of the "rolling prairie." The little village in its midst is, to all outward appearance, the exact reproduction of those which I have already passed; but at the first glance I see that there is something

wrong.

The streets are unwontedly quiet; the few faces visible wear a settled gloom which contrasts weirdly with the careless merriment usually seen upon them; while even the postmaster appears moody and abstracted, copying my pass in a dead silence, very strange in one of his garrulous race, to whom ten minutes' chat with a passing traveller supplies the place of both newspaper and telegram. My new driver, too, takes his seat without a word; and this universal gloom, together with the unnatural emptiness of the streets, and the dreary, plague-stricken look of the whole village, recall to me, with ghastly vividness, the aspect of Central Russia during the destroying sweep of the cholera in 1871. But here the calamity is of another kind. Just as we get clear of the village, the plaintive music of a Russian hymn comes floating upon the still air; and I see, a few hundred yards to my right, a crowd of peasants moving in slow procession, and in their midst the long dark robe and

flowing hair of a priest, with the crucifix glittering in his uplifted hands.

"What's all this?" ask I.

"We're praying for rain," answers my driver, in the dull, weary voice of a man without hope; "but it never comes. God is angry with us, and we must just suffer. What is to be, will be!"

"Are you fearing for the harvest, then?"

Ah, master! how can we help fearing for it? Twice already our crops have failed, and now, this third time, there's been no rain for weeks together, and the ground is as hard as iron. If the harvest fails again this year, then-God help us all!"

And then in a few simple, touching words, he tells the dismal story. Two bad harvests in succession; seedcorn becoming dearer-dearer still—and at length failing altogether; food purchased at exorbitant rates from the harpies who are never wanting to fatten upon the misery of provincial Russia; men scattering over the whole face of the country in quest of work to keep them from dying of hunger; long weeks of gnawing anxiety, sinking at length into the apathy of despair. And, all the while he is speaking, the mournful cadence of the people's prayer rises and falls like the moan of a distant sea, and the poor creatures turn their longing eyes to the clear, bright, merciless sky which looks down upon them as if in mockery.

I would gladly say a word of comfort to him, if I knew how; but there are calamities in the presence of which all consolation is struck dumb. All that I can

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