Russia in 1839 -Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia

А NIGIIT IN A RUSSIAN VILLAGE.121

fold: tlie horses become scarce, the roads such as would destroy any vehicle; and the traveller asks himself, with a kind of shame, what could have been his motive for imposing upon himself so many discomforts, by coming to a country that has all the wilduess, without any of the poetic grandeur of the desert ? Such was the question I addressed to myself this evening, when benighted on a road, the difficulty of moving in which was greatly enhanced by a new unfinished chaussée, which crossed it at every fifty yards, and by tottering bridges, which had often lost the pieces of timber the most essential to their security.

My meditations at length determined me to halt, and, to the great annoyance of my coachman and feldjäger, I fixed on a lodging in the little house of some villagers, where I am now writing. This refuge is less disgusting than a real inn : no traveller stops in such a village ; and the wood of the cabin serves as a refuge only to the insects brought from the forest. My chamber, a loft reached by a dozen steps, is nine or ten feet square, and six or seven high ; it reminds me of the cottage of the imbecile old man in the story of Thelenef. The entire habitation is made of the trunks of fir-trees, caulked with moss and pitch as carefully as if it were a boat. The same eternal smell of tar, cabbage, and perfumed leather, which, combined, pervades every Russian village, annoys me ; but I prefer headache to mental distress, and find this bed-chamber far more comfortable than the large plastered hall of the inn at Troïtza. I have fixed in it my iron bedstead : the peasants sleep, wrapped in their sheep-skins, on the seats ranged round the room on the ground-floor.

YOL. III.G