and duties as free men. They are a source
of great fear and anxiety to their late lords.
They can by no means be persuaded to work, on
any terms. They are too much intoxicated with
their liberty, to think of anything but drink
and marriage. The most marked result of
emancipation, up to the present time, is a
passion for matrimony, which has seized with
irresistible force upon all the adults, and has
impelled them to wedlock under difficulties, as
strongly as Irishmen are similarly impelled. No
chance of work out of them for many a day.

Notwithstanding, therefore, the energy and
attention to business of the eminent firm to
which I belong, and brisk as we may be with
our orders for mowing-machines and thrashing-
machines, we shall hardly be able to make
the supply equal to the demand. I perceive
that the enlightened and patriotic fraternity of
British commercial travellers are destined shortly
to work some very important changes in this
country by the number and frequency of their
visits. Among other things, it is humbly hoped
by this writer that we may do something towards
the bettering of hotel accommodation. If the
reader had been with me lately, he would have
hoped so too.

I arrived early in the afternoon at a straggling
cluster of buildings whicli served for a
posting-house, only a few hours' journey from
one of the greatest of the Russian cities, and on
one of the most frequented highways in the
empire. Descending from the disjointed
wheelbarrow which had conveyed me and my bruises
thither, I walked into a whitewashed room,
furnished with a paralytic looking-glass, and a
greasy thing made of hay, fleas, and oil-cloth
banged up together by main force into a knobbly
mass, which looked more like a divan than
anything else, though not very like that. It was
intended for a bed, and there was no other to
be had. There was no other furniture in the
room, nothing else of any kind. We could get
no horses. It appeared inevitable that we must
pass the night there, and that Providence had
sent an unknown delicacy to the active little
inhabitants of the divan, in the person of a
plump and tender Englishman.

"Was there anything to eat?" "No, there
was nothing to eat." Sentiment expressed
by the word " Niet," uttered impatiently in
his sleep by the waiter, when he was found
out by our poking at a sheepskin lolling against
a post: said sheepskin having boots at one end,
and the other end terminating abruptly in wool.
Having delivered himself of the drowsy
monosyllable above mentioned, waiter seemed to
consider that his immediate object in life was
fulfilled, and that it was unreasonable to hold any
further communication with us.

"Was there anything to drink?" "Da"
("Yes.") Affirmative expression used by
another individual while curling himself up in a
corner to lie down; this person having evidently
no connexion with the person in sheepskin.

Postmaster, a German, being subsequently
discovered, after a long and perilous search,
behind a pipe in an outhouse, is thus addressed:
" Haben sie was zum essen."—I want some
dinner. The language spoken among the class
immediately superior to the peasantry is
generally German, in the South.

Postmaster, personally appealed to, continues
to smoke, as if the demand in no way concerns
him. It is repeated, and then reiterated with
increasing energy. Postmaster thus finding the
tranquillity of his rest disturbed, rises and walks
into the house with a deprecatory snort. I
follow him, and we go together into the room
where the paralytic looking-glass, the divan, and
its eager inhabitants await us. Postmaster gets
a tumbler by some means out of a queer chink
in the whitewashed wall, and then apparently,
urged at last to perform the rights of hospitality,
passes through a door, which I innocently
suppose leads to a kitchen. An hour afterwards
that postmaster is found in exactly the same place
where we first saw him, having given no further
thought to us whatever.

Two things rolled up in sheepskins being seen
tumbling about outside the door, and trying
to cuff each other in some uncouth sort of play,
are discovered to belong to the establishment,
and to be a young man and woman making
love after the custom of their class and country.
Young woman having ducked her head rather
too suddenly to escape a clout heavy enough to
stagger an ox, brings that head, much tousled
and otherwise discomposed, against a post, which
tells how far we are from Kiev. Thus sobered,
the young woman may be addressed with
advantage. Her hair is of the colour and appearance
of old tow; it does not seem ever to have
been combed; her features are kneaded up
together; her mouth and nostrils have neither
shape nor make; they are simply round holes in
a face of brick-dust colour. Her eyes look like
gooseberries, and have no visible lashes, but
shine as if they had been polished.

Her swain having gone off to sit on a neighbouring
stone, this young woman is pathetically
interrogated as to the chances of dinner. Young
women are proverbially compassionate, but
nothing can be got out of this young woman. She
stands looking at us until she has recovered the
concussion of the brain which she must have
received by bringing her head full butt against
that post, and then rolls off to Ivan Ivanovich
and begins thumping at him again.

At length, a man who has roused himself to
do something to the stove, is caught by self and
fellow travellers, and his way back to his corner
being resolutely cut off and blockaded, is
brought to a parley. His intelligence having
been quickened with a ten-copeck piece, he
ultimately brings us a semovar full of hot water,
and this is all we can get, or are likely to get,
until twelve o'clock next day, when perhaps, if
we look very sharp, we might get some tschee,
or cabbage-soup.

But were not those horses—of course they
were—quietly being put to a traveller's carriage,
who arrived only half an hour ago, made himself
some tea from a supply of that dainty which he