national soup made of beef and sour cabbage or
beetroot. Solid food is dangerous on the road.

But in spite of all precautions the accidents
to travellers are very numerous every year.
Horses, coachmen, and travellers are sometimes
all frozen together. The snow-drift dazes and
blinds. The wayfarer sometimes loses all reckoning
of his course. A friend of mine rode out in
a snowstorm upon a pressing journey; after
travelling all day he found himself in the same
place whence he started. Twenty-seven peasants
travelling from one village to another,
were all found and brought home a few hours
after their departure stiff and dead like wooden
men. A servant sent on an errand stopped at a
vodki shop, drank a glass of brandy, and was
frozen going home a few streets off. There is
no end to such stories. I myself found a milliner's
girl exhausted and freezing while sent on
an errand. She had fallen down before the
steps of my hotel and must have died but for
speedy help. A bridal party of twelve country
folk were all frozen while going some miles to
church. It seems a not unpleasant death to be
frozen. An hour will do it, and we pass through
the golden gates of sleep with bright and gorgeous
dreams. Drowsiness is the first dangerous
sensation. As long as a limb tingles with pain it
is still sound. When the pain ceases the peril
begins. A limb once frozen, even if saved,
always feels the least cold afterwards. The
persons whose noses or ears are frozen may not
be aware of it. Anyone who passes by will
therefore stop them to tell the disagreeable
news, and assist in restoring the circulation.
This is usually effected by rubbing with snow,
a remedy which, if applied in time, prevents all
mischief. The freezing of the gristle of the ear
is a most unsightly accident.

It is not only on the road that accidents
happen from cold. Accidents from people being
in too great a hurry to warm themselves when
under cover, are by far the most frequent of the
many mischiefs which are constantly happening
during the two terrible months of January and
February. A few days before I made this
memorandum, a company shut themselves up in
a well-heated room after dinner, and were found
all stifled. Eight persons were saved a day or
two afterwards from a similar fate, only by the
howling of a dog who was in the room with
them. A girl having been found with her lover
who had been forbidden her father's house, was
so scolded that the poor thing wandered forth in
despair. When her father's heart smote him
and he went out to look for her, she was found
frozen to death near the door-step. It is so cold,
that wine and all sorts of provisions freeze.
Money and metals burn the bare fingers as if
red hot, and take the skin off them.

Horses and dogs resist the cold best. Oxen
and cows seem to wither in it. Twelve hundred
sheep and five shepherds, were all lost a few days
since. Sheep caught in a snow-drift, canter
wildly and scared before it, and are not to be
turned aside. If they meet with water in their
panic flight, they rush in and are drowned. If
they meet with a precipice they tumble over,
and are dashed to pieces. They seem to be
deprived of all self-management. In the extreme
cold the bustard, the partridge, and the hare,
may be found frozen; even the fish are said to
suffer in the water, and are easily caught by
merely making an opening in the ice, to which
they swim at once for air.

It is towards the end of January that we
begin to hear grim news of the wolves. It
is then that they congregate together in large
packs, and grow famished and dangerous. This
is the only time of the year, when driven by
extreme hunger, they will venture even singly to
attack the traveller. All that is fabled of the
cunning of the fox is true of the wolf. The
fox is quite a simpleton in comparison to him.
The wolf will attack a whole flock of sheep, and
worry and carry away as many as sixty iambs
from it, one after the other, to his lair in a
single night. He never stays to eat a single
one lest he should be caught, swollen and lazy,
after a good dinner, on the scene of his felony.
He never ventures to have an orgie but in the
privacy of his own apartments. I mention the
number sixty because a single wolf did actually
take sixty lambs from the flock of a friend of
mine in one night. The wolf's mode of attack
is simple and noiseless. He seizes the lamb by
the throat, and the little victim is dead before
he can utter a single baa to call the watch-dog.
Indeed, the wolf is so strong as to be more than
a match for one dog, and often even for several
dogs. He is more than a match also for one
horse, and sometimes for two horses, but not
for three, for when there are three horses
together they can keep their heels always
towards him, and master wolf fears a horse's
kick by experience. He knows that his bones,
tough and elastic as they are, may be broken
by it. His mode of attacking the horse is to
glide up stealthily to a convenient distance
from which he may make a sudden spring and
seize the horse by the nose. If he once get a firm
grip there he never looses it till the horse falls
down from pain and fatigue, and then he becomes
an easy prey. In the same way one or two
cows have no chance with him, but sometimes a
number will keep him off by getting close together,
and butting at him with their horns. A
man was attacked by wolves near the countryhouse
of a friend of mine. They devoured him so
completely that only a portion of his boots, all torn
to ribbons, were left to tell the tale. The wolf,
notwithstanding his prudence and great courage
when hungry, is very nervous. He is, like most
animals, especially afraid of fire; a lucifer-match
will daunt him at his fiercest, and a traveller
with a good supply of matches need only to light
them one after the other while in danger to keep
off a whole pack. The peasants also make use
of his own cunning to deceive him. They tie a
long string or rope after their carts, wolf thinks
this a trap to catch him and will not come near,
but prowls about at a distance, watching them
with red, sleepless eyes. Dogs, horses, and
cows seem to be aware of his approach from a