short of keeping awake when he is sleepy,
merely because he drives. Considering the
immensity of the country, the number length and
character of the roads, and that the yeamscheek
is the only reliable land-carrier for
passengers and goods (excepting the few
railways), the number of these men must be
immense. They played no unimportant part
in the Napoleon invasion, and in the transport of
troops and material of war to the Crimea, and
to write anything about interior travelling in
Russia, without giving a few lines to the
yeamscheeks, would be leaving Hamlet out of
his own play.

Let no man imagine that he has tried
Russian travel if he have merely visited Moscow
and Petersburg, and run a few hundred versts
on any of the few main well-kept roads. Wide
of these, lies on both sides the interior life of
this immense country, and to see it we must
penetrate through forests seventy miles long,
jolt over wave-like undulations of endless barren
or poorly-cultivated land, and bid farewell to
every vestige of macadam. In my case the
deviation from the main road took place at no
indicated point. No finger-post pointed the
way, no road led to it.

"I want to go to Evanofsky."

"Well," said the yeamscheek, "that is the
road."

"Where? I see no road."

"Ah, yes! but I'll find one." And with that
he turned the horses' heads at right angles to
the straight broad road we were on, lashed,
screamed, and succeeded in plunging us across a
deep wide ditch, into what appeared to me to be
an endless pathless expanse of stubbled and
unstubbled ground; tree, shrub, fence, post-house,
or hut, there was none, to mark the route as far
as the eye could reach. The frost tinged the
expanse with white, and the wintry sun, as it
shone with a cool light over the long sweeping
undulations of the ground, made the surface of
the land glisten like water. Some of us,
indeed, could scarcely be persuaded that we were
not about to plunge into some trackless pool,
without compass, pilot, or chart. The
inexperienced will always bid a regretful farewell to
the beaten road, as to an old friend, and will
face the trackless ground with uncomfortable
notions about grizzly bears, wolves, ditches,
precipices, and snow-storms. I confess that I lost
sight of the black-and-white striped mile-post
with some regret. Hitherto we had travelled
with these posts and the telegraphic wires,
constantly on our right and left, as mute friends
and companions. We could read the number
of versts on each post when we had nothing else
to do, and we could think of human messages
going and coming on the wires; but now they
are gone on far to the south, keeping company
with travellers on the one good broad road that
leads to Odessa. As for us, we were over the
ditch, and off through the fields.

The change was sudden and complete; but
all changes are sudden and complete in Russia.
Summer goes in a day, and winter comes. One
may cross a river in a boat at night, and walk back
on the ice in the morning. Doors and windows
stand wide open in summer for a breath of cool
air, but in winter the cool air is barred out with
double windows, triple doors, and heated stoves.
So in regard to clothing; thin linen summer
habiliments are thrown aside in a day, and the
reign of furs begins. Wheels are upon all
carriages of every sort one day, snow comes during
the night, and the wheels all vanish; in the
morning, nothing is seen but sledges. The
transitions from class to class are of the same
character. One class is of gentlemen and barons;
the next step is to mouscheeks, peasant-serfs
who live on black bread and salt, seasoned with
sour cabbage and garlic, and who are covered
with a dirty sheepskin instead of being clothed
in ermine, sables, and fine linen. Croustadt
is reached from Petersburg by steamers in one
week; in the next, the traveller runs over
the same water with three horses before him.
The people will leave a hot bath and plunge
into a hole made in the ice; they will leave a
room, heated to seventy or eighty degrees, and
follow a funeral for six miles, with no covering on
their heads, in a frost twenty-five degrees below
zero; they will fast seven weeks on cabbage
and garlic, and then guzzle themselves in a few
hours into the hospital, take cholera, and die.
Diseases are generally swift and fatal—to-day
well, to-morrow dead. More than two-thirds of
the cholera cases die. Women are interesting,
plump, and marriageable, at fourteen; they are
shrivelled at thirty. Despotic power works in
extreme without control, religion without
morality, commerce without honesty. There is
land illimitable, without cultivation. There are
splendid laws, and poverty of justice. Some of
these contrasts are now being softened down by
the wise progressive policy of Alexander the
Second.

Off the beaten track it was that I first learned
what yeamscheeks and horseflesh could
accomplish. If our courage and confidence sank a
degree, and we held on with bated breath as the
tarantasses jolted over the deep ruts, ran on one
wheel along the edge of a steep slope at an
angle of forty-five, or plunged into a chasm with
a crash, to be pulled out by the most desperate
application of the whip, no such charge can be
brought against the drivers; they seemed to
rejoice in having quitted the monotonous road,
and their spirits appeared to spring into new
life with every obstacle. They had now got
something to drive over—something worth being
a yeamscheek for: "Go, my angels!" "Step
out, my dear pigeons!" "Climb up, my
sweetheart!" And at every ejaculation down came
the knout with terrible force and effect.

At one o'clock in the afternoon of the second
day after leaving the main road, we came in
sight of the end of our wanderings, on the slope
of a long hill. We were obliged to pack up.
The descent was steep, and looked extremely
dangerous; the yeamscheeks, for the first
time, paused before taking it. I got out to
reconnoitre. On each side of us lay a dense and